tl;dr: Head to https://recipes.karylstein.com/ to visit the new recipe site.
For a long time, I have been keeping my recipes in OneNote. This has worked well, but one of my latest projects has been to move away from corporate cloud solutions and software that is not usable across a variety of platforms including Linux. Since OneNote is not really supported on Linux and relies on OneDrive for synchronization across devices, I started looking for an alternative for notes. That was accomplished, but for recipes I wanted a better solution that allowed more “cooking-centric” searching, meal planning, and shopping list management options. That led me on a journey to try various “self-hosted” options, namely:
I was looking for something that did not require any subscriptions, and was fully accessible from Android, Apple, Linux, and Windows devices. All that I tried mostly fit the bill, but in the end I chose Mealie. It does pretty much everything I want, is actively supported, and as a bonus provides a web site that can be configured so people can easily view and search recipes without needing to create an account.
Unfortunately, moving all my recipes to the new system requires manual work. While Mealie has various import options, none of the straight-forward “one-click” options worked for me. When moving away from OneNote for recipe storage, I converted everything to markdown format. This was quite easy using a tool I found on the Internet. But Mealie did not have an option to import things from markdown (or OneNote). While it does allow for scraping recipes from web sites, it expects a certain format for those and I could not just point it to all the recipes I had posted on my web site. What Mealie had, however, was an “import with AI” option and I had recently set up a local local LLM (large language model or “AI”) implementation at home. While this still requires some manual work to clean things up after they are imported, the “AI import” option has worked well to get recipes into Mealie.
At the time of writing, I am only about 1/8th of the way to getting all my recipes into Mealie, but I have the process down well at this point that it does not take long to transfer something over. The public view of the recipes only exposes a fraction of how I plan to use Mealie for managing shopping lists and meal planning, but I think offers a much better experience for people just wanting to browse things. That is not my main focus as I am more concerned about making my life easier instead of making some site that others use, but it is a side-benefit for any of the handful of people that may want to look things up.
I still plan to post short blurbs about food that makes it onto my “this is something I make a lot” or “this is something that my kids or family may find nostalgic” on this web site. But the full recipes and other details will be stored in Mealie. That means that there will be some duplication of copy, but mostly just the description. At this point things are in transition, but as things are moved over, you will now see links to Mealie on things here instead of a full recipe. You may also just go to https://recipes.karylstein.com/ to access Mealie directly.