Re:‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks
by papa_bear on Sunday November 18, 2018 @04:44PM
(#18482676)
Thanks for the feedback!
You're right that the default settings are pretty skewed towards simple meals. We need to make these options more prominent I think, but if you click the 3-dot menu next to a meal's title, you can change the allowed prep-time and desired "meal complexity".
The meal complexity has a huge impact on what recipes are available, and if you bump a couple meals up to moderate or complex, you'll get a lot more variety. Let me know if that improves things at all for you (I think a lot of the more interesting vegetarian/vegan dishes probably fall under a higher complexity setting).
However, I follow a vegetarian diet (as in 95% of my intake is vegetables, legumes and grains), and the generator is having trouble composing meal plans. It says so if you click on Details next to the calorie target. The picked meal plans differ from the carb/fat/protein targets significantly, and the meals are all uncooked: salads, smoothies and deserts. So the vegetarian "menu" doesn't really work, unfortunately.
I thought that the database is severely skewed towards animal-based diets, but if I pick "anything" in the diet menu, I still get mostly salads, sandwitches, scrambled eggs, and stuff like yogurt, nuts, cheese slices, with some meat and eggs here and there of course. What stands out is that most things seem to require very little preparation. Is this tool oriented towards people unexperienced in the kitchen? Or maybe people who don't want to spend time preparing food? That's a nice option to have, but to only have recipes like that is a bit strange. Also, since I was told by a physician I should avoid raw vegetables and eat them well cooked (I used to eat raw or minimally cooked in the past), at least 3/4 of the suggested meals are no-go for me.