Import a recipe with AI

AI import turns a recipe into a draft, ready to review and save. It lives in the chat with Mirabel: give her recipe text, a link, or a photo, and she builds a draft you open in the editor to save. A substitution the source offers and an ingredient it marks optional come through as fields — a substitute row under the ingredient, and the line’s own optional mark — rather than a note in the footer. This page is the short version — the full walkthroughs live on her page.

Use AI import for a website, a dictation, a foreign-language source, a cookbook page, an index card, or a handwritten note. To import recipes you already have as .md, .txt, or .zip files, use Markdown import instead. A ZIP, or several files picked together, imports with no AI at all. A single file already written in Mirepoix’s own recipe format is read exactly as written, also without AI; any other single file takes the same read as pasted text, so it can fall back to AI.

Before you start

Look for the Add Recipe button at the top of your recipes list. Tap it and Mirabel walks you through where the recipe’s coming from. The button and her guided interview are always there for a kitchen member — importing from a website, pasted text, or a file works without any AI. What needs an Anthropic API key is AI itself: the photo route, and the AI read this page’s other sections describe (the fallback when a page or paste is too messy to read plainly). Without a key, the photo option isn’t offered and a messy source can’t escalate to AI — Mirabel reads what she can on her own or asks you to paste the text in. (On mirepoix.recipes the key is set by the operator. Self-hosted deployments set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in their environment.)
Each kitchen shares one monthly AI allowance across everyone in it — the same pool covers AI import and Mirabel’s chat. Importing keeps working when it runs out, because she reads what she can on her own; her chat pauses until the allowance resets on the 1st of each month.

The short version

Tap Add Recipe at the top of your recipes list. Mirabel opens and asks where the recipe’s coming from.
Pick a source — From a website, From a photo, I’ll paste the text, or From a file — and give her the recipe when she asks.
Watch for the Recipe draft card she adds to the chat; ask for changes in plain words until it looks right.
Tap Open in editor (or Save it) to open the draft in the full-page recipe editor, review it, and click Done. Nothing is saved until you save it here.

Read directly, with no AI

When you give her a recipe through one of the choices above — pasted text, and for many web pages too — Mirepoix first tries to read it itself, without AI. If it comes through clearly, your draft appears right away. (Pasting a recipe into her box out of the blue, rather than through the paste choice, is an ordinary message and imports with AI — see Import a recipe by pasting it.) Mirabel says where the draft came from — read exactly as written because the file was already in Mirepoix’s own format, read straight from the site’s own recipe data, or pieced together from the text. She also points out anything to double-check, like a title she wasn’t sure about or ingredient lines that didn’t parse cleanly. A draft she reads this way is free: it doesn’t count against your monthly AI allowance.

A website’s structured recipe data reads into a faithful draft with no AI, and a single rough ingredient line no longer breaks the whole import. Any rough lines are flagged for you to double-check — never handed off to AI. A single file already in Mirepoix’s own recipe format reads exactly as written, with no AI and nothing flagged. Through these choices she turns to AI only for messier sources: text you paste, a single file that isn’t in that format, a page’s visible text that’s too jumbled to read plainly, or a structured page too broken to read on its own. That fallback runs only when AI is available. Photos always use AI.

When the allowance is used up, importing still works for pasted text and most web pages — Mirabel does her best to read it on her own and tells you to review the draft carefully before saving. If she can’t make out a recipe on her own, she’ll ask you to copy the recipe text and paste it in instead. Either way, running out of the allowance no longer stops you from importing.

On a draft she read directly, a Use AI instead choice appears under it. Tap it to redo that import with AI — useful if the quick read missed a step or an amount.

The import bookmarklet reads a page’s structured recipe data when it’s there. Most food blogs and recipe sites publish that data behind the page. Clicking it saves the capture to mirepoix quietly — a small confirmation appears in the corner of the page with an Open link, so there’s no need to switch tabs right away. Find them later under Pending Imports at the top of your recipes list. It opens a list of everything waiting, each row naming the recipe with the site it came from and how long ago you saved it. Tap a row whenever you’re ready and Mirabel opens with a confirm card naming that page, offering Import and Dismiss. Tap Import and, when the bookmarklet found structured recipe data, your draft appears right away with no AI. Dismiss drops that capture and leaves the list. Without it she falls back to the page’s visible text, and points out anything to double-check. Some sites block the quiet save — there the bookmarklet opens Mirabel directly with the captured recipe instead, the way it always has, so you can confirm the import by hand.

Each way in has its own walkthrough on Mirabel’s page:

Import a recipe by pasting it
Import a recipe from a photo
Import a recipe from a link
Import from your browser or by sharing — the bookmarklet and the phone Share sheet

Where the recipe came from

Give Mirabel a link — paste the address, or send the page in with the import bookmarklet — and the draft records that address as the recipe’s Source. The saved recipe shows it at the bottom of the page as a link back to the original, and the site’s name comes from the address itself, never from a guess. She won’t repeat the link as a footer note as well: the recipe has its own field for it. This happens whether she read the page on her own or handed it to AI.

When the source isn’t a link — it’s named in the text you pasted, printed on the photo you took, or something you told her (“this is from Julia Child”) — there’s no address to record. She credits it in the recipe’s footer instead: “Based on a recipe from Julia Child.” Either way she never invents a source. If the recipe doesn’t say where it came from, the draft leaves it blank, and you can fill in the Source field yourself when you edit the recipe.

When an import comes from a web page — a link you paste or type, or a page you hand her with the bookmarklet or the Share sheet — she also brings over the photo in the page’s recipe data, for you to keep or drop while you review the draft. See a photo that came in with an import, which also covers which imports bring a photo and which don’t.

Times on the draft

A draft read straight from a site’s structured recipe data brings the recipe’s times with it, so you don’t fill them in by hand. Time comes from the page’s own total time; when the page states only a prep time and a cook time, those two are added together instead. Active is the page’s prep time — the hands-on part.

Mirepoix leaves Active off when the page’s prep time is longer than the total, rather than saving a pair that can’t both be right. Set it yourself in the editor if you want it.

Both land in the editor’s Time and Active fields, and read on the saved recipe as Takes 45 min (15 min active).

Serves and Makes on the draft

A draft read straight from a site’s structured recipe data brings the page’s yield with it. When the page names what it makes — “10 to 12 latkes”, “1 1/2 dozen cookies” — the draft carries Makes: 10-12 latkes or Makes: 1 1/2 dozen cookies, numbers as written; when the page gives a plain number or counts servings — “8”, “6 servings”, “4 people” — it carries Serves: 8 instead. Only one of the two lines is filled in. Serves: is always a single whole number, so a page that serves “10 to 12” becomes Serves: 11, the middle of the range. Change either one in the editor before you save.

Tags on the draft

A draft read straight from a site’s structured recipe data arrives with tags already in it. Mirepoix takes them from the page’s own keywords, category, cuisine, and diet labels, keeps only the ones it recognizes as tags, and stops at six. It adds weeknight itself when the recipe’s total time is 30 minutes or less and it has fewer than 10 ingredients (as long as there’s room under the six-tag cap).

A draft Mirabel handed to AI gets weeknight on the same rule, and no tags from the page’s labels.

Either way the tags are a suggestion in the draft. Change or remove them in the editor’s Tags field before you save — see tags and categories.