About Cook.md

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. There's no subscription, no lock-down. 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.