Welcome to my cooking vault!
On this public version you can find my collection of recipes, ingredients, and cookbooks (inspired by Frank’s cooking). This is just the public facing arm of a larger Obsidian vault where I manage my grocery list (see this guide) and keep track of restaurants I liked (or hated so much it was noteworthy).
Cooking as a database
The beauty of using Obsidian for this kind of thing is that I can attach metadata to each recipe or ingredient note. This allows me to query notes as if they were in a big database, which can be used to look at my cooking knowledge from several different angles
For example, I can see all my recipes for a certain cuisine:
Japanese
File length healthy course chicken karaage 30 🟠 main katsu 45 - main Japanese pickles - - side Teriyaki - - - Restaurants
Link to original
File city rating Fusjon Venice 4.5 Restaraunt au Passage Paris 4.5 Eel sushi London 4 Jin Kichi London 4 Sushi express Chiayi 4 Sushi samba London 4 Eat Tokyo London 3.5 Misato London 3
all the lunch recipes under 20 mins long:
| File | length |
|---|---|
| Lamb burger | 15 |
| Tuna Melt | 10 |
| bbq pork bun | 10 |
or I can plan a meal around a single ingredient in my fridge:
asparagus
Link to original
Tweaking to my taste
When making a recipe the creator will try and find the combination of ingredients that will work best for most people. But I am not cooking for most people, I am cooking for myself.
The internet is full of different ways to achieve the same end goal. Its always funny to see one youtube video say “you must absolutely avoid this” after just seeing the same tip in another video. After trying to recipe out for myself, I will include a embedded link to my favourite website and write warnings to myself if I messed something up. In this way, I can keep building on my skills and technique and not accidentally create a chemical weapon by putting 3 tbsp, instead of 3 tsp, of fish sauce in my Thai green curry.
Restaurants
How many times have you taken a picture of a restaurant dish and left if lost in your cluttered camera roll? Since Obsidian keeps track of all the links between files, I can have a dataview query to show all the times I have had this meal in a restaurant. That way I can judge if I have hit RQ (restaurant quality).
e.g. restaurants with Egg fried rice
| File | Rating |
|---|---|
| Gold mine | 5 |
| Wing Tai | 5 |
| Fusjon | 4.5 |
| Royal China | 3.5 |
| Tian Fu | 3.5 |
Groceries
Each recipe has its own list of ingredients set out like ingredients
This means they can be collected and shown by the Checklist plugin. This setup also works really well for keeping track of the Pantry, if I run out of something I just untick it from the list and it will automatically pop up when I go to buy the ingredients for some recipe…magic