Why I Built Recipes for ComingUp Today
When we first started building ComingUp Today, the focus was simple: shared schedules. We wanted a place where multiple people could see what’s coming up without duplication, confusion, or endless back-and-forth messages. That part of the mission remains core. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}
But over time, it became clear that schedules are only part of what families and households coordinate in daily life.
There’s another kind of knowledge we keep tucked away in scattered places: recipes.
Recipes are memories, traditions, and shared experiences. They are the dishes we enjoy together, the meals that become part of our family story, and the things we want to remember, revisit, and pass on.
Preserving Family Legacy
Some of the recipes we care about most come from people we love.
Those handed-down recipes carry more than instructions — they carry stories.
They remind us of the moments when we shared them, the people who made them best, and the way a dish tasted when someone special cooked it. I wanted a way to preserve that in a living, connected place — not locked away in notes apps or lost to forgotten browser tabs.
With recipes built into ComingUp Today, they aren’t just text on a page. They become part of your family’s shared context — accessible anywhere, by anyone in your group you choose to share with.
Saving Our Favorites — AI Inspired and Otherwise
We cook with a mix of sources:
- Recipes we grew up with.
- Dishes we fell in love with from friends.
- New ideas discovered through experimentation.
- And sometimes wonderful results inspired by AI that we want to keep forever.
Too often, we find a recipe that’s outstanding, cook it once or twice, and then it’s gone — lost to the internet, lost in search history, or buried in notes.
The recipe system in ComingUp Today lets us save the recipes we use and love in one place. Structured fields — from image to ingredients, prep/cook/wait/total time, and instructions — make it easy to record, revisit, and really use them.
Instead of hunting through bookmarks, screenshots, or memory, you can open a recipe and make it again with confidence.
Sharing with Family and Friends
Part of what makes food special is sharing it with other people.
When we make something for family or friends and they ask “Can I have the recipe?”, it used to create friction.
Now:
- Recipes can be shared publicly.
- Your kitchen has a public page where anyone with the link can browse all your public recipes.
- You can even link to other people’s kitchens — extended family, friends, caregivers — and hop between cookbooks easily.
This creates a sort of network of cookbooks — a shared space to explore what people actually eat and enjoy.
It’s not just about posting a recipe online. It’s about connecting with the people you care about through the meals you share.
Knowing Who Eats What and How
Another practical motivation was something even more personal:
We wanted to know which of our children liked which foods.
Every family has its quirks:
- One kid loves spaghetti but hates the sauce everyone else likes.
- Another can’t handle barbecue sauce at all.
- Someone always wants extra spice.
- Another has an allergy or preference that matters.
Recipes in ComingUp Today let us:
- Track who in the household eats it (always private only visible to your family)
- Add family-specific notes so you remember preferences, tweaks, or special considerations (always private only visible to your family)
That way, when someone’s taking over dinner or planning meals for a week, they don’t have to ask — the information is already there, contextualized, and actionable.
Avoiding Lost Recipes and Fragmented Memory
One of the most relatable reasons for building this was simply this:
We kept losing recipes online.
We found them once, enjoyed the result, and then couldn’t remember where we saw them. Who wrote them? Which site were they on? Which variations did we use the second time?
By capturing them in a structured recipe system:
- Recipes become searchable
- They are organized in your cookbook
- They aren’t lost to tabs, screenshots, or old links
It’s a personal library of meals that matter to you, your household, and the people you share with.
A Hub of Connection
Recipes are not just content. They’re connected life context.
We built them this way because:
- They help preserve family legacy.
- They make it easy to save, find, and share what you cook.
- They connect you to people you care about through shared cookbooks.
- They make meal planning part of the everyday coordination you already do.
- And they help turn dishes and memories into reusable, meaningful knowledge.
If you want to learn more about how recipes work and how cookbooks can connect you, head over to the recipe feature page to see all the details.