About

During the pandemic, I was living in a tiny village on the Irish east coast. With quarantine restrictions, we couldn't go further than 5 km from our house. Online shopping became the only option, and it revealed an unexpected frustration: without wandering through all aisles, I either forgot essentials or ended up with a dozen things I didn't need. After juggling sticky-note meal plans that quickly grew repetitive, I thought: "It's time to automate this… and never solve it twice."

So I began writing recipes in plain text — tagging ingredients with @:

Poke holes in @potato{2}.

Add @salt and @ground black pepper{} to taste.

That simple markup — both human-friendly and machine-readable — became the heart of Cooklang.

Next came the power tools: a parser, then a CLI, that turn your .cook files into shopping lists, organized by department with one command:

$ cook shopping-list Monday.cook Tuesday.cook

Shopping became faster, cooking became smoother.

But it's not just about lists — it's about ownership and flexibility. Because Cooklang is just text, you can version control it, tweak it, and use it forever. No database, no lock-in. Your recipes are yours.

I practice what I preach — my own recipes live in a public GitHub repository, where anyone can see how I organize meals, automate shopping, and continuously refine my cooking workflow.

What started as developer convenience turned into something joyful — meal planning is no longer a chore, it's a creative act. Cooklang emerged from necessity, yes — but now fuels creativity and clarity in the kitchen.

2026: Cooklang is still free and open source — the language, the parsers, the CLI and Cook Editor — and so are the mobile apps. What isn't free is what runs on servers: sync across devices, photo and social imports, nutrition data and CookBot. That is Cook Cloud, and its subscriptions are what pay for my time on all the rest. If you stop paying, every recipe stays a plain-text file on your disk.