I cook most of my meals from scratch. It's not about being fancy—it's just how I like to eat. But after years of following recipes, I kept running into the same frustrations over and over. Eventually, I decided to fix them.
The Timer Problem
My Alexa is great at setting timers. "Alexa, set a timer for 12 minutes." Done. But here's the thing: when you're cooking a real dinner—not just heating something up—you're rarely timing just one thing.
Last Tuesday I was making roasted chicken thighs with green beans and rice. Three dishes. Three different cooking times. Three timers running simultaneously. When one went off, I had to remember: wait, which timer was that? The chicken? The rice? And then I'd be standing there, hands covered in raw chicken juice, trying to ask Alexa which timer just finished while she cheerfully offered to tell me a joke instead.
There had to be a better way.
The Coordination Chaos
Even when timers work perfectly, there's a bigger problem: getting everything to finish at the same time. Anyone who's served hot mashed potatoes alongside cold, waiting-too-long chicken knows what I mean.
I'd find myself doing mental math before every meal. Okay, the roast takes 45 minutes, the potatoes take 25, the asparagus takes 12... so I start the roast, then wait 20 minutes, then start the potatoes, then wait another 13 minutes, then start the asparagus. Except I'd inevitably get distracted, miss a window, and end up with that familiar disappointment of a meal that's half hot and half lukewarm.
I wanted something that could just tell me: "Start the chicken now. In 20 minutes, start the rice. In 33 minutes, start the green beans." Something that understood I was cooking a meal, not just isolated recipes happening to exist near each other.
The Shopping List Nightmare
But honestly, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was grocery shopping.
My workflow used to look like this: Find recipes for the week. Open each one. Scroll through ingredients. Try to remember what I already have. Manually type everything into a notes app. Realize at the store that three different recipes all called for onions, but I'd written "onion" three separate times instead of "3 onions." Buy duplicates of things I already had. Forget the one ingredient that was actually important.
Every. Single. Week.
I tried other apps. Most of them wanted me to use their recipes, from their database, with their meal plans. But I didn't want their recipes. I wanted my recipes—the ones I'd bookmarked from food blogs, photographed from my grandmother's recipe box, saved from NYT Cooking. I just wanted help managing them.
So I Built MealCraft
MealCraft started as a weekend project to scratch my own itch. I wanted three things:
- Timers that know what they're timing. When a timer goes off, I want to see "Flip the chicken" on my screen, not just hear a beep and have to remember what I was doing.
- Multi-dish cooking that actually works. I want to cook a main and two sides and have the app coordinate the timing so everything finishes together.
- Shopping lists that build themselves. I want to pick recipes for the week and get one combined, deduplicated ingredient list organized by grocery store aisle.
That was the original vision. Along the way, I added recipe importing (because manually typing recipes is tedious), AI-powered search (because sometimes I just want "something quick with chicken"), and a bunch of other features that made my own cooking life easier.
What MealCraft Is (and Isn't)
MealCraft isn't trying to teach you to cook. It's not a social network for foodies. It doesn't have a library of thousands of recipes for you to browse.
It's a tool for people who already cook and want the logistics to be less annoying. Import your own recipes from wherever they live. Plan your meals. Generate a shopping list. Cook with confidence that your timing will work out.
I built it because I needed it. If you're the kind of person who cooks from scratch and has felt these same frustrations, I think you might need it too.
Ready to make cooking a little less chaotic? Join the beta and try it out.