CookSimple
Clean, practical recipes designed for cooking — with serving scaling, unit conversion, cook mode, shopping lists, and no clutter.
Open a recipe → immediately see what you need → cook it.
Live site: https://cooksimple.freewebtoolss.workers.dev
What it does
- Recipe-first pages. Title, times, servings, ingredients and steps at the top. No life story, pop-ups, signup walls or autoplay video.
- Serving scaler. Pick 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 / 10 (or any number) and every amount updates, including quantities in the steps. Results are written in real kitchen measures ("¼ cup + 2 tbsp", not "⅜ cup"). Eggs stay whole; amounts that shouldn't scale (pasta water) are marked and explained.
- US ↔ metric. Exact conversions (1 cup = 236.59 mL, 1 oz = 28.35 g). Volume only becomes weight for ingredients with a stated grams-per-cup (flour, sugar, butter…). Oven temperatures round to 5 °C, doneness temperatures to 1 °C.
- Cook Mode. One step at a time in large type, ingredients a tap away (with checkboxes), the amounts each step needs, built-in timers, a screen wake lock, swipe/arrow-key navigation, and the back button closes Cook Mode instead of leaving the page.
- Timers that keep accurate time in the background and survive a reload, with sound, vibration and an on-screen alert.
- Ingredient checklist, kept for the browser session.
- Shopping list combining several recipes: grouped by aisle, duplicates merged ("9 cloves garlic"), checkable, copyable, printable, stored only in the browser.
- Search by name, ingredient, cuisine, meal type or time ("vegan 30 minutes"), with filters for meal type, vegetarian, vegan, quick, one-pan, freezer-friendly and free-from (dairy, egg, gluten, nut).
- What can I make? Enter what you have; see recipes from the collection that use it and what's still missing. It finds existing recipes; it doesn't invent any.
- Saved recipes and personal notes. Save favourites and keep your own notes on any recipe; both stay in your browser.
- Meal planner. Plan the week by day and turn the whole plan into one shopping list.
- Collections such as quick weeknight dinners, vegan, and bake-ahead breakfasts.
- Nutrition estimates per serving, worked out from the ingredients, plus free-from labels checked against every ingredient.
- Share buttons that use your device's share sheet or copy the link.
- Offline mode. Pages you have visited and your saved recipes work without a connection.
- Print view with just the recipe: title, times, temperature, ingredients (in your chosen servings and units), steps.
- SEO: unique titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph, Recipe + Breadcrumb structured data, sitemap.xml, robots.txt.
- Privacy: no accounts, analytics, cookies, trackers or third-party scripts. A strict Content Security Policy.
Recipes
224 original recipes written for this project (recipes/*.json). No recipe text or descriptions were copied from other sites or books. Illustrations are original vector art generated by scripts/illustrations.mjs. Dish photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences (CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA) and are credited on each page and in data/photos.json. See RECIPES.md to add a recipe, including licensed ones with attribution.
Project layout
recipes/ one JSON file per recipe (the content)
data/ingredients.json ingredient vocabulary: aisles, diet flags, synonyms, densities
src/lib/ pure logic shared by the build and the browser (units, scaling, tokens, search, shopping list)
src/client/ browser code (recipe page, Cook Mode, timers, search, shopping list)
src/templates/ HTML templates used by the build
src/styles/site.css the one stylesheet (includes print and dark mode)
src/illustrations/ recipe illustrations (SVG)
src/photos/ dish photos from Wikimedia Commons (credits in data/photos.json)
src/images/ rendered PNGs for structured data / social cards, and icons
scripts/ build, validate, local server, browser tests, image generators
public/ the built site (generated, committed, deployed)
test/ unit and build tests (node --test)
No runtime dependencies and no npm packages: everything uses Node built-ins. Wrangler is run with npx.
Commands
npm run check # validate recipe files
npm run build # validate + write the site to public/
npm test # unit + build tests (fails if public/ is stale)
npm run serve # local server at http://localhost:8787
node scripts/e2e.mjs # browser tests in headless Chrome (local build)
node scripts/e2e.mjs https://… # the same tests against a deployed site
node scripts/illustrations.mjs # regenerate illustrations
node scripts/render-images.mjs # regenerate PNG images (needs Chrome)
node scripts/fetch-photos.mjs # fetch Commons photos for recipes without one
npx wrangler deploy # deploy public/ to Cloudflare
Ads
One slim Adsterra banner below each recipe (320×50 on phones, 728×90 wider), in its own small frame, never inside the ingredients or steps, in Cook Mode or in print. It is off until Adsterra banner codes are added to site.config.json; how to switch it on is in ADS.md.
License
Code: MIT (see LICENSE). Recipe text and illustrations: © CookSimple, all rights reserved. Photos belong to their authors and keep their own licences (see data/photos.json).
