Help & Reference

Recipe format

Recipes are plain text in a Markdown variant the app parses into title, ingredients, steps, and notes. Write by hand, paste from another source, or use the graphical editor — the file on disk is the same shape either way.

A complete example

# Pancakes

Fluffy weekend pancakes.

Category: Breakfast
Tags: quick, weekend
Makes: 12 pancakes
Serves: 4
Time: 25 min
Active: 15 min

## Mix the batter.

- Flour (all-purpose), 190 g
- Milk, 240 g
- Eggs, 2
- Butter, 2 tbsp: Melted.

Whisk dry ingredients. Add wet ingredients and stir until just combined.

## Cook the pancakes.

- Butter

Pour about 60 g of batter per pancake onto a hot buttered pan.
Cook until bubbles form and edges look set. Flip and cook 1 minute more.

---

Try adding blueberries or chocolate chips to the batter.

Title

The first non-blank line, marked with #. Required.

# Pancakes

Description

An optional paragraph that appears as a subtitle on the recipe page. Place it between the title and the first step. In recipes that use explicit ## step headers, lines between front matter and the first step also count as the description, so the order of description and front matter is flexible. (In recipes without ## headers, prose after front matter is parsed as the implicit step instead.)

# Pancakes

Fluffy weekend pancakes.

Front matter

Optional lines before the first step. Each line is one key, a colon, at least one space, and a value — no leading whitespace.

Line Example Notes
Category: Category: Breakfast One per recipe. Overrides the category chosen when creating
Tags: Tags: quick, weekend Comma-separated. Each tag is lowercased; runs of whitespace become hyphens (slow cooker → slow-cooker)
Makes: Makes: 12 pancakes What the recipe produces. Requires a unit noun; Makes: 12 alone is rejected
Serves: Serves: 4 Number of servings. Used for per-serving nutrition
Time: Time: 1 hour 30 min Total time from start to plated. Accepts forms like 30 min, 1h, 2 hours 30 min
Active: Active: 30 min Hands-on portion of Time:. Requires Time: to be set; can’t exceed it

Makes: and Serves: can appear together — Makes: 1 loaf paired with Serves: 12 is valid.

Steps

Each step starts with a ## heading. The heading text is a short label that appears as a section header on the recipe page. Periods at the end (## Mix the batter.) are convention in the sample recipes, not a parser requirement.

## Mix the batter.

- Flour, 190 g
- Milk, 240 g

Whisk until smooth.

A recipe with ingredients but no ## headings is still valid — the parser treats the whole body as a single implicit step.

Ingredients

Ingredient lines start with - . The shape is:

- Name, quantity: prep note

Examples:

- Butter                          ← name only
- Flour (all-purpose), 190 g      ← name and quantity
- Eggs, 2                         ← name and count
- Eggs, 1-2                       ← name and range
- Milk, ½ cup                     ← unicode fraction
- Butter, 2 tbsp: Melted.         ← name, quantity, and prep note

Supported unicode fraction glyphs: ½ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞. Mixed forms like 1½ or 1 1/2 work too. Ranges accept -, –, —, or − between numbers. When you scale the recipe, a range scales from its high end — scaling 1-2 by 2 gives 4.

The colon and comma are reserved delimiters. The first colon starts the prep note; everything before it is the name and quantity, split at the first comma. (A comma after the colon stays in the prep note.) A comma inside parentheses doesn’t count, so Sugar (brown, packed), 150 g keeps its full name. To add a prep note without a quantity, use a colon — a comma puts the word in the quantity slot instead:

- Onion: diced      ← prep note
- Onion, diced      ← "diced" becomes the quantity

When two recipes share an ingredient, the grocery list combines the quantities. Two recipes calling for Flour, 190 g add up to 380 g on one line.

Cross-references

A step can pull in another recipe’s steps. Embedded form goes inside a step on its own line:

## Make the sauce.

> @[Simple Tomato Sauce]

A bare @[Recipe Title] in prose — step text or footer — renders as a clickable link without embedding. Full syntax, including multipliers and prep notes, is on Cross-references.

Scalable numbers

Append * to a number in step instructions, ingredient prep notes, cross-reference prep notes, or the footer to mark it as scalable. When a reader changes the serving count, marked numbers update.

Divide the dough into 8* equal pieces.

- Eggs, 2: Beat with a fork until uniform, about 30* seconds.

> @[Pizza Dough], 2: Make a double batch — about 90* minutes total.

---

Yields about 12* cookies.

Numerals, fractions, and English number words from zero* through twelve* are all scalable. See Scaling for what scales automatically without *.

The first --- on its own line ends the recipe body and starts the footer. Everything after it is rendered as plain Markdown — good for notes, sources, and variations. Because that first --- is reserved as the footer separator, you can’t use one as a thematic break between steps.

---

A good basic pancake. Pairs well with @[Maple Syrup].

Things to know