Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
For loyal readers of this column (both of you, and, yes, I’ve used that joke before and undoubtedly will again), you may recall that this column addressed recipe management once before, but we ran into evident bugs and a lack of documentation for the KRecipes application, so we were not entirely successful in those efforts (see Everyday Ubuntu in Full Circle Magazine issue #148, page 28 and issue #150, page 30). The ultimate problem was that KRecipes would not work correctly: it would save a file after entering recipe instructions, but upon re-opening the file, the instructions had not actually been saved. It was also impossible to save recipe pictures.
Since then, I’ve updated from my hamster-wheel powered Ubuntu 16 rig to Ubuntu 20. On my 16.10 machine, I couldn’t get any other recipe software, besides KRecipes, to run at all. Now, however, I can run both Kookbook and Recipes. Since a big part of the holiday festivities every year revolves around cooking, it seems like now would be an especially good time to revisit the subject of how Ubuntu can help us with the cooking aspect of everyday life. Kookbook has a simple main screen (see image left)
Let’s enter a basic sugar cookie recipe, so we can bake Santa some goodies to leave out. Here’s our ingredient list: • ¾ cup sugar or sucralose • 1 1/8 tsp baking powder • ¼ tsp salt • 1 cup all-purpose flour • 1 egg • ¾ stick softened salted butter • 1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
And here are our instructions: • Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. • Cream the softened butter with the sugar. This can most easily be done with an electric mixer, but can also be done with a spatula. • Add one whole egg and the vanilla, mixing until incorporated. • Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture while continuing to mix until dough just becomes smooth in texture. • Chill dough, covered, in the refrigerator for an hour. • Divide the dough into 6 equal parts. Shape each portion into a ball and flatten slightly. • Bake on a cookie sheet (pre-sprayed with cooking spray) at 350 degrees F for 8-10 minutes, until lightly browned. • Remove to wire rack to cool. By the way, this recipe can scale up readily to make larger batches.
Kookbook Installation To install Kookbook, go to the Ubuntu Software Center (icon on the Launcher that looks like a suitcase with a blue circle and nine small dots or squares): If the Software Center does not default to the Explore tab (top of screen), click it. Click the magnifying glass at the top left to invoke a search, then type in Kookbook. You’ll get the Kookbook information page: From here, you can select Install at the top to install the Kookbook software. This screenshot shows Launch, but that’s because I installed it previously. To launch the software, click the nine white dots/icon at the bottom of the Launcher: then look for Kookbook in the installed applications. You can navigate from page to page using the white dots on the right side to go up and down by page, or simply type Kookbook at the top and hit <Enter> to search.
Adding a New Recipe Once we’ve found and launched Kookbook, we can enter a new recipe. Click the ‘plus’ symbol at the top to begin a new recipe: We’ll have to create a new, empty recipe file. Let’s select Documents on the left, then click the New Folder ‘Plus’ icon at the top right, then type in Recipes as our new folder name. For the recipe name up top, let’s use the name Sugar Cookies (see image below). This is supposed to invoke an editor for recipe entry, but that did not happen for me. Let’s try clicking the Open Collection icon at top left:
Then we’ll browse to the Recipes location. Hmm, the folder is still empty, so the program didn’t even save an empty file. Time to contact our best friend, Google. Well, maybe my friend, Google, is really Le Chiffre’s friend, Google (gratuitous James Bond reference), because I could find next to nothing on Kookbook. No documentation, no existing recipe collections, and it looks like it’s technically a beta, and has seen no development progress for about two years now. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling Kookbook, but that resulted in no change.
Markdown Files Well, we can read the documentation within the program and see if that helps, minimal though it is. It tells us it uses a ‘markdown file’. I don’t really want to learn a computer format just to use a recipe application, but let’s see how hard it is. The documentation that comes up in the initial application window shows us this information on the file format it uses (see image below). So let’s give it a try. Editing text files, especially initialization and configuration files, used to be a completely essential Linux skill. While that may not be so much the case any more, it can still prove valuable, so let’s give it the ol’ college try, for practice, if nothing else.
We can find the default text editor the same way we launched Kookbook. It is imaginatively named ‘Text Editor’, although you can certainly use other editors if you prefer. Let’s launch it and we’ll enter this text (shown top right) into it. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll skip the ###Meta section’s potential contents. Now, we’ll save the file to Home/Documents/Recipes as ‘Sugar Cookies.recipe.md’, the prescribed file name format for the markdown files:
Success (?) If we open the Recipes folder as a collection, as we tried before, we can now see the Sugar Cookies recipe. Click the recipe name in the top left pane to display it: We can also now edit by clicking the Edit Current Recipe button at the top: Which will bring us to the screen where we can modify the recipe as desired: Save after completing any desired edits, using the Save button up top, then close the editing window to return to Kookbook.
Conclusion I have to say, for something you would hope would be a simple task, and user friendly, I have to rate this as a fail. It works, after a fashion, but it needs considerable refinement if the everyday user is to have much hope of getting effective results. Next month: We’ll try something else for recipe management.