FAQ

You don't have one — nobody here does. Press Sign In, enter your email, and click the magic link we send you; the link is how you sign in. The same email also has a 6-digit code you can type instead.

Type the 6-digit code from the email into the Check Your Inbox page on your computer, then click Sign In. The button in the email signs in whichever device you tap it on, so it would sign in your phone instead. The code works for 10 minutes and only once; if it has run out, ask for a new email.

Press Ask to Join on the recipe, type your name and email, and send the request. The person who shared it decides: if they approve, an invitation arrives at your email, or, while the site is full, word that you're on the waitlist. If they decline, or don't answer, you won't hear anything.

Invites last 7 days. The expired-invite page has a “Join the Waitlist” button — click it and you'll be emailed a fresh invitation once a spot opens, usually within a day.

The site caps how many invitations can be out at once. When it's full, new invites queue up instead, and convert to real invitations automatically as spots open.

Yes, and it stays signed in — you won't have to ask for a new magic link because of it. After you've read a recipe the site offers this once, and you can do it yourself any time.

On an iPhone, tap Share — the square with an arrow, either in the bottom bar or behind the ⋯ next to the address — then Add to Home Screen. On Android, tap ⋮ next to the address bar, then Add to Home screen.

If your iPhone offers a choice, leave Open as Web App on — it opens without the browser bar, which is the point of having the icon. An ordinary bookmark works too and keeps you signed in just the same; it simply opens in your browser like any other page. Either way, nothing about your recipes or your account changes — it's the same site, just quicker to reach.

If you ever sign out inside the icon, tapping the emailed link signs in Safari, not the icon: an iPhone keeps the two apart. To sign the icon back in, type the 6-digit code from the email into the code box the icon shows under Check Your Inbox. Or press and hold the Sign In button in the email, choose Copy Link, and paste it into the link box below the code box.

Recipes imported from other websites are permanently Private — no sharing, not even with your Family, and no Make It My Way copies — because the content belongs to the original site. It's your personal reference copy, and you are the only person who ever sees it.

Titles are permanent — the title becomes the recipe's web address when it's first saved. If a title is truly wrong, re-create the recipe under the right name. Everything except the title is editable forever.

Once you've typed or picked something, a link, Cancel or Back first asks Leave Without Saving? Keep Editing takes you back to the form just as you left it, and Leave throws away what you entered. On a computer, reloading or closing the tab asks too, in your browser's own words. Create Menu and Review Import ask before you leave as well, though leaving Review Import keeps your import in this browser: Pick Up Your Import, at the end of Import Recipes, brings it back until you start another one. The browser's Back button and a phone's back swipe don't ask, so on a long new recipe, press Save Draft as you go.

Leave Quantity empty. The line then reads as just the ingredient and whatever note you added — “canola oil, about 1 1/2 inches deep, for frying” — which is how a cookbook writes it. That's not the same as to taste, which means you'll taste the dish and decide: salt and pepper are to taste, frying oil, pan spray and a garnish aren't. On your shopping list an empty quantity shows the ingredient on its own, so you still know to buy it. The one thing you can't do is pick a unit and leave the number out — “cups” with no number has nothing to show, so you'll be asked for the amount.

Because no measuring cup is marked 0.9. Amounts here are written the way cups and spoons are marked: whole numbers and fractions, like 7/8 cup or 1 1/2 teaspoons. Cups and teaspoons also take thirds (1/3 cup, 2/3 teaspoon), and teaspoons go down to 1/16. When an amount doesn't fit, the form tells you the two nearest ones — for 0.9 cup, 7/8 or 1 — and you pick.

Metric is different, because scales and measuring jugs really are marked in decimals: 2.5 ml and 1.25 kg are fine. A can size like 14.5 oz is fine too, since that's what the label says. The same rule covers the shopping list, when you set your own quantity or add an extra item.

That recipe is held back until you decide, because the app keeps amounts to what a measuring cup or spoon can show. The line is listed under the recipe, and where the app can, it offers the nearest amount as a button — Use 7/8, say — which changes just that line. If you'd rather not, leave the recipe out of the import and add it yourself with the amount you want. Nothing changes unless you press the button, and an import never converts units, so a recipe written in milliliters stays in milliliters.

Because they're easy to mix up and they mean different things: oz is a weight, fl oz is a volume. Choosing the weight one for something you pour means your shopping list ends up asking you to buy half a pound of milk, which isn't something you can weigh at a shop. It's only ever a question — nothing is changed unless you tap Use fl oz, and you'll only see it for things that pour, never for something like cream cheese where ounces are right.

Yes, two ways, both on the Import Recipes screen under the + button. Paste a list of up to twenty recipe web addresses, one per line — or upload an export file from a recipe app you already use: Paprika, Copy Me That, Recipe Keeper, Nextcloud Cookbook, Mealie, Plan to Eat, MyRecipeBox, Chowdown or Tandoor.

Either way you land on a review screen showing everything that was found before a single recipe is created. Rename anything, drop what you don't want, and add the short description each recipe needs. Nothing is saved until you confirm.

Because it has to be yours. Ingredients and cooking steps are facts and instructions, which is why we can bring them across — but the little write-up above a recipe on someone else's site is that author's own writing, and copying it isn't ours to do.

Importing from a website always asks for one. The recipe arrives with the description blank and waits for a sentence of your own. If a recipe in the batch isn't worth writing one for, drop it from the import instead.

Bringing in your own recipe box from another app only asks where you marked the recipe as yours — and then only if the export didn't already carry a description. Anything you marked as somebody else's has its description left out on purpose, and we don't make you invent one to replace it.

The review screen lists every one that didn't work, with the reason beside it, so nothing disappears silently. Usually it's one of three things: the page doesn't publish its recipe in a form we can read, the address was mistyped, or the site asks automated tools not to fetch its pages.

That last one is worth knowing about, because retrying won't help — it says so in the reason. For those, open the page yourself, copy its source, and paste it into the single-recipe importer instead.

Some sites publish a file asking automated tools not to read their pages, and we honor it rather than ignoring it. When that happens you'll see a note offering another way in: open the page in your own browser, copy its source, and paste it into the box that appears. That reads the same recipe data a normal import does — so it works on pages that publish ingredients and steps in a structured form, and can't pull a recipe out of a page written purely as prose.

In Claude, not here — you add this cookbook as a connector in Claude, and Claude sends you back to this site to say yes.

The one thing to bring with you is the server address, which is on Manage Profile under Connect Claude with a Copy button beside it. In Claude, go to Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, paste it in, and save. Leave the advanced settings alone — you don't need any of them.

It helps to be signed in here first. If you are, connecting is one Allow and you're done. If not, you'll be asked to sign in by email in the middle of it, which works but means waiting for a link.

Exactly what you could see yourself, and less than you can do. It can search and read any recipe you can already see, and read your shopping list.

It can suggest a new recipe, or changes to one of your own, and both wait in Finish Drafts until you confirm them. It can also change five things straight away, without asking: add a recipe to your shopping list, record that you cooked something, favorite or unfavorite a recipe, hide or unhide one of your own recipes, and write or clear a private note. None of those changes a recipe's words, and you can undo each one yourself.

It cannot see anyone else's private recipes, save a recipe to your cookbook, rewrite a recipe without your confirmation, write reviews or comments in your name, delete a recipe, share anything, or touch your account, your Family or your menus.

If that's more than you want, disconnect it — Manage Profile → Connect Claude, where you can also see when each connection was last used. That date is worth glancing at: it's how you'd notice a connection being used by somebody who isn't you.

No — and this is the same answer whether Claude proposed the change or you asked it to make one. What you have is a copy of your recipe with the changes applied, sitting beside the original in Finish Drafts. Your recipe is untouched until you save it: Replace Original opens your recipe's edit form with the changes filled in, and nothing changes until you check them and press Save Recipe.

If you edited that recipe yourself after the suggestion was made, the page warns you before you replace anything — the suggestion was built on the older version, and replacing would quietly discard your own edit. There is no version history to undo that, which is why the warning is there rather than an apology afterwards.

Claude is the only one we've tested, so it's the only one we can tell you about.

ChatGPT's free plan can't do this — it gives you nowhere to add a custom connector, so there is nowhere to put the address. That is a limit of the free plan rather than anything about this site, and we don't know whether a paid ChatGPT plan is different.

Alexa isn't supported yet. There is nothing to set up for now.

If you try one, the Support page is the place to say how it went — working or not. Nothing about your recipes depends on it either way.

No. A recipe from Claude only ever lands in Finish Drafts for you to look at — it cannot save a recipe to your cookbook, and it cannot publish or share anything. You open the suggestion, check it, answer whose recipe it is, and press Save to My Recipes. If you'd rather not have it, throw it away and nothing was ever created. Anything you do confirm is saved as Private until you decide otherwise.

A draft is a recipe that isn't a recipe yet. It isn't in your cookbook, nobody else can see it, and nothing about it is permanent — not even the name, which is normally fixed forever once a recipe is saved. Drafts live under the + button, as Finish Drafts, and the number on + is how many are waiting.

You get one either by pressing Save Draft on the Add Recipe form, or from Claude if you've connected it. Either way, nothing becomes a recipe until you confirm it.

You can also get rid of one. Every draft has a Throw Away button, whichever way it arrived — one you started and put down, a suggestion from Claude, or a proposed change to a recipe you already have. Throwing away a proposed change leaves the original recipe untouched. It asks first, because there is no undo.

Cook From Pantry takes your list literally — it doesn't assume you have anything you didn't list, not even salt, oil or water. That's deliberate: guessing what's in your cupboard is how these things end up wrong.

So either add the everyday things to your list, or use Plus a Few Missing, which is what most searches want. One thing to know: recipes name ingredients precisely, so if you listed salt and the recipe calls for Kosher salt, those count as different things.

Public Recipes holds every recipe anybody has made Public — the same list for every member. A Mine toggle narrows it to the ones you put there.

My Recipes (choose Mine under Showing) is the other half — everything you created, public and private together, with Public and Private filters of its own.

Because that's how recipes are written. Tablespoons stay tablespoons and cups stay cups at 1X, 2X and 3X, so 6 cups of broth reads “6 cups,” “12 cups,” “18 cups” — and a recipe never writes one amount as two units (“1 cup plus 2 tablespoons”). The one change is teaspoons, which become tablespoons only when the amount comes to a whole number of them: 3 teaspoons reads “1 tablespoon,” while 4 teaspoons stays “4 teaspoons.”

A liquid you wrote in quarts stays in quarts, and a dry ingredient stops at cups, since nobody measures flour by the quart. You don't set this anywhere; the app already knows which ingredients pour.

Your shopping list is different, because it's for buying. It adds an ingredient up across recipes and may switch to a bigger unit, so a liquid can read “1 1/2 quarts (buy 2),” with how many to buy rounded up. When a total comes to a big number of spoonfuls, it says “about” and rounds up to an amount you can measure, like “about 1 1/4 cups.”

Save a Copy keeps it as it is. Make It My Way opens the editor so you can change it. Either way the recipe is yours, starts out Private, credits the original with a “Saved from” line, and stays with you even if the original is later made private or deleted.

The offer to save a copy appears once, after you cook, favorite or shopping-list someone else's recipe. That offer is the way in, so “No thanks” ends it for that recipe — but Make It My Way still keeps it afterward.

Two things worth knowing. A copy of a recipe shared only with a Family is yours to keep but stays Private for good. And while you haven't changed a copy it's still the same dish, so cooking it counts on the original — change it and it becomes its own dish, counting from zero.

Log Meal is a one-tap “I cooked this” that feeds the cooked counters. A Review is your star rating and comments — one per recipe, updatable anytime. Neither requires the other.

Reviews, ratings and comments belong to Public recipes only. On a Private one — your own, a copy you saved, or a recipe shared with a Family — the tools are your cook log and your private notes instead. If an owner makes a reviewed recipe Private, nothing anybody wrote is deleted: it goes quiet, stays readable by the owner, and comes back if the recipe is made Public again.

You can log each recipe once every 24 hours, so the counts stay meaningful. If you've already logged it in the last 24 hours, the button tells you when you can log it again. Cooked it on a day you forgot to log? Add that date from the Cook Log in My Recipe Library — past dates aren't limited, so you can catch up on a whole week at once.

Because the conversion isn't exact, and a recipe is the wrong place to round. A cup of flour and a cup of sugar don't weigh the same, so “250 g” has no single right answer in cups — any number the app picked would be a guess printed as a fact.

So metric stays metric and imperial stays imperial, exactly as the recipe was written. You can pick grams, kilograms, milliliters or liters yourself in the recipe form too.

The one place you'll notice it: if one recipe asks for butter in grams and another asks for it in ounces, your shopping list shows both on one line, joined with a plus (“8 ounces + 250 g Butter”), rather than adding them into a single number that would be slightly wrong.

My Notes is your private notepad — visible only to you, on any recipe. Background Story is written by the recipe's owner and shown to everyone.

Its owner stopped sharing it — they made it Private, hid it, or left the site. You can see a recipe for as long as its owner shares it, and not after: having cooked it, favorited it, or reviewed it doesn't keep a copy of it open for you.

Your own history is untouched. Your cook log still says you cooked it and when, and everything you wrote is still in your Export My Data file. If it was one of your favorites, it drops out of that view and a quiet line counts how many — without naming the recipes or their cooks — with Remove Them (or Remove It, for one) if you'd rather clear them.

Next time, save a copy while you can see it. After you cook, favorite, or shopping-list somebody else's recipe, the page offers Save a Copy once. It's one tap and the copy is yours for good. If you turned that offer down and later change your mind, Make It My Way keeps the recipe too.

Yes. Avatar menu → Manage Profile → No Longer Shared With You lists your reviews, comments, cook logs and private notes on recipes that are no longer shared with you, and your reviews and cook logs on menus that are no longer shared with you. It shows what you wrote, not which recipe or menu it was on — that stays private to its owner. Remove anything one at a time; it can't be undone. The section only appears when there's something in it.

If a recipe was made Private but you can still open it through your Family, your own review and comments are on the recipe page itself, under What You Wrote.

Yes, if they saved one while it was shared. A copy belongs to the member who saved it: they can keep it, change it, and share it here under their own name, with a note showing it came from yours. Making your recipe Private later — or leaving the site — takes it off the shelf for everyone, but it doesn't reach into anybody's collection and take back a copy they already have.

A recipe you shared only with your Family can be copied by family members too, for their own use, but those copies can never be made Public.

A read-only preview of the full recipe — photo, ingredients, steps — with a note that you shared it. They can't change anything or see any member content beyond that one recipe, and they can't join on their own: the preview has an Ask to Join button that sends you a request. The link expires after 7 days; re-sharing renews it.

You get an email, and Invite Friend in the account menu shows a count. Open it to see their name and email under Requests to Join, then choose Approve and Invite to send them an invitation from you (or add them to the waitlist while the site is full), or Decline, which doesn't tell them. Requests you don't answer expire after 30 days.

Either 7 days passed (share again — you'll get the same link, renewed), or the recipe was made Private, which turns off its links immediately. A link that hasn't expired works again if the recipe goes back to Public.

Only what you type in and the things you do to recipes — no location, no advertising or tracking identifiers of any kind, and no record of which pages you looked at, apart from when you last read the comments on your own recipes, which is how the new-comments count works. (Visits to the site are counted in total, without cookies and with no way to trace them back to you.) Your last ten searches are remembered — a search counts only once you open a recipe from it — so the search boxes can offer them back to you; they're listed in your export too, and you can wipe them whenever you like with Clear Search History on the Manage Profile page. Export My Data holds all of it except recipe drafts you haven't finished, and the site's own bookkeeping, such as your assistant connections and when you last read your recipes' comments; the Privacy Notice says so, and you can ask for those too.

Yes — when you create it, or any time afterwards from the My Family screen. Everyone in the Family sees the name, and the owner or any admin can change it. It's only a label, so it doesn't have to be unique and nothing else changes when you rename it. Leaving it blank is fine too.

Open the recipe from Cookbook → Recipes, with Mine chosen under Showing, and turn on the Family toggle — the one with the people icon, next to Public/Private. It's per-recipe, and only on a recipe's own page, so there's nothing to switch on from the browse grid. Anything you share appears under the Family filter for everyone in your Family. You can only share recipes you added yourself.

Those are two separate steps. Adding someone lets them see recipes you share, but it doesn't share anything by itself — each recipe still needs its Family toggle turned on from its own page. A Private recipe stays private to everyone else either way; the Family toggle is what opens it to your Family specifically.

Yes. You can belong to as many as you're added to — your own, a partner's, a friend's. You can only create one, though. Once you're in two or more, the Family button on a recipe turns into a short list so you can pick exactly which Families to share it with. Nothing is shared until you check one, and sharing with one Family doesn't share with the others.

Yes — make them an admin from the My Family screen. An admin can add members, remove members, and rename the Family. Choosing admins, removing an admin, and handing the Family over stay with you, the person who created it, so nobody can make themselves in charge.

Both. If you joined someone else's Family, Leave This Family is on the My Family screen — it always asks first, and tells you what you'll lose: access to the Private recipes shared with that Family, all of them, including ones you cooked or favorited. If you created a Family you can't leave it, but you can use Make Owner to hand it to another member. You stay a member and keep your recipes — but only the new owner can hand it back, so it's not something you can undo yourself.

A Menu is a named group of recipes you cook together — a Thanksgiving spread, a BBQ — and it stays put so you can use it again next year. A Shopping List is for one trip to the shops. Make a menu from the + button → Create Menu, or add the recipe you're looking at with More → Add to Menu.

Yes to both, on a public menu. Tap Review or the stars under the menu's name to give it one to five stars and an optional note — you can update it or remove it whenever you like. Rating your own menu is allowed, exactly as it is for your own recipes. A private menu takes no new ratings; any it already has still show, and it opens for rating again once it's public. A menu nobody has rated shows no stars on its card rather than an empty row, so you can tell "no rating" from "rated badly".

Cookbook → Menus lists every menu that's been made public, newest first, with who built it. To add one of yours, open the menu and switch it to Public, beside “Created by you” under its name — that's only possible when every recipe in it is public as well, so nothing private can slip out. Hearting a menu, or pressing Favorite on it, saves it to the Favorite Menus view under Cookbook → Menus.

Times you cooked the whole menu — not the recipes in it. Press Log Meal on the menu the day you make the spread, and the count goes up by one however many dishes it holds. Cooking one dish on its own is logged on that recipe and leaves the menu's count alone. You can log the same menu once every 24 hours.

Not unless you choose it. A menu starts private — yours alone — until you either share it with someone or switch it to Public, which puts it on Public Menus for everyone. Deleting a menu removes the menu only — every recipe in it stays exactly where it was.

If nobody else has touched it, nothing — it just goes private. If people have hearted it, reviewed it, or logged cooking it, you'll be asked to confirm first and told how many. Those people lose it straight away: it disappears from their Favorite Menus, counted in a quiet line that names nothing, and anything they wrote is kept out of sight unless you make it public again, though they can still remove their own from Manage Profile. Anyone you shared it with directly still keeps it, because that share is still a share.

No. Sharing a menu shares the menu, not the recipes in it — anything private stays private, so they may see fewer dishes than you do. The Share window tells you how many of its recipes are private before you send it — including one somebody else made private after you added it.

A short message appears the next time you open the site, wherever you happen to land, and the menu shows up under Cookbook → Menus, in its “Shared With Me” view. The same happens when someone adds you to their family. We don't email you about either.

Yes — leftovers are a feature. You can even have two separate Sunday rows for this week and next.

Use the Extra Items section on the Shopping List page — add “bread” with no amount, or “2 lb sliced turkey” with one. It merges with recipe ingredients automatically.

Open your list and tap Shop This List. Tapping an item checks it into your cart — it grays out but stays in its aisle, so the walking order never changes under you. Checked items are saved to your account, so locking your phone or switching devices keeps them. Done Shopping clears the list for next time, and asks you to confirm first because it empties the whole list and can't be undone.

No — the plan and the list are separate. “Add to Shopping List” copies your plan's recipes over; after that, each is managed on its own.

It counts distinct ingredients on your combined list, not recipes — if three recipes all need garlic, garlic counts once.

Avatar menu → Export Recipes → Select All Mine → Generate, then “Save as PDF” in the print dialog.

Avatar menu → Manage Profile → Export My Data. You'll get a zip file holding your recipes and the full-size photos you have uploaded, including the photos on your reviews, comments and cook history; your reviews, comments and private notes; your favorites; your cook history; your shopping list and meal plan; your menus, both the ones you made and the ones you saved, cooked or reviewed; your recent searches; the equipment you have marked as owned; your Family memberships; invitations you sent, including any you requested while the site was full; and invitations sent to your address by somebody else, and any request they made to add you — as a page you can read in any browser plus a data.json for other programs. This is different from Export Recipes, which builds something to print; this one is your whole account, and it's yours to keep. It leaves out recipe drafts you haven't finished, and the site's own bookkeeping, such as your assistant connections and when you last read your recipes' comments. Finish any drafts you want to keep first.

Avatar menu → Manage Profile → Delete My Account. You'll be shown exactly what would be deleted and what would be kept before anything happens, and you have to type DELETE to confirm.

Your account is locked straight away, but nothing is deleted for 30 days. Signing in during those 30 days cancels it and puts everything back as it was, apart from any invitations you had sent, which you can send again. You don't need to do anything else, and we'll email you 5 days and 1 day before. If you want a copy of your recipes first, use Export My Data on the same page.

Everything Private or hidden is deleted for good — your Private recipes, any Public one you have hidden, your Private menus, your private notes, your favorites, your shopping list and your meal plan — along with your email address and your login.

Recipes and menus you made Public are kept, still credited to you by name, so somebody who cooks your brisket every Passover doesn't lose it. Your reviews and comments stay too, shown as being by “User Deleted”, so a conversation doesn't end up with half its replies missing. Nobody can edit a kept recipe or menu afterwards, and a kept menu stops being shared with anyone you had shared it with — it is Public, so it needs no sharing to be readable. If other people had cooked one of your Private recipes, their own cook history keeps the recipe's name and the date; the recipe itself is gone.

If you own a Family with other people in it, you choose who takes it over from the members who can: anyone active who doesn't already own a Family. If none of them can, the Family stays for the others, and goes to whoever can take it over by the time your account is deleted, or else is left without an active owner. If nobody else is in it, it closes with your account. You are also removed from any Family somebody else owns that you belong to — recipes you shared there stop being shared, and nobody in that Family is told.

Cooking With Mom is in closed beta, so there's no ticket system — just email support@cookingwithmom.app. Feature ideas, questions, a recipe that seems inappropriate, or any other comment at all are all welcome there.