How It Works

There are no passwords: To sign in, press Sign In at the top of the home page, type your email address, and we'll send you a magic link — clicking it signs you in. That's the whole system: nothing to remember, nothing to forget. If the email doesn't show up within a minute or two, check your spam folder.

Signing in on another device: The email also has a 6-digit code. If you asked to sign in on your computer but opened the email on your phone, type the code into the Check Your Inbox page on the computer instead of tapping the button, which would sign in the phone. The code works for 10 minutes and only once, and it stops working after 5 wrong tries; the button works for 24 hours. Either one signs you in once.

Joining is by invitation: A current member invites you, and you'll get an email with an invite link. A recipe someone shares with you can be read without an account, and its page has an Ask to Join button that asks them for an invitation. The first time you sign in, you'll be asked for your first and last name — that's the entire signup.

Inviting somebody yourself: The account menu has Invite Friend. Enter their email address and we'll send them a magic link. Once it's sent you can also copy or share that same link yourself, which is handy if you'd rather message it than rely on email. The same 7-day expiry and the same waitlist rules below apply to invitations you send.

When someone asks to join: If you shared a recipe and the person you sent it to asks to join, you'll get an email, and Invite Friend in the account menu shows a count, such as “Invite Friend (2)”. Open it to see their name and email under Requests to Join, then choose Approve and Invite or Decline. Approving sends them an invitation from you, or adds them to the waitlist while the site is full; declining doesn't tell them. Requests you don't answer expire after 30 days.

Invites expire after 7 days: If you click an invite link too late, the page will say so — and offer a “Join the Waitlist” button right there, so a late click is never a dead end.

Sometimes there's a waitlist: The site is in an invite-limited beta, so there's a cap on how many invitations can be outstanding at once. If someone invites you while the site is full, you're added to the waitlist instead, and you'll automatically get a real invitation by email once a spot opens — usually within a day, and first come, first served. You don't need to do anything in the meantime.

You can keep it on your phone's home screen: Once you've read a recipe, the site offers this once — and you can do it any time yourself. 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.

It stays signed in: The icon opens straight into your recipes — you don't sign in again, and you won't need a new magic link because of it. 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. Saving it as an ordinary bookmark works too and keeps you signed in just the same — it simply opens in your browser like any other page.

Signing the icon back in: If you sign out inside the icon, tapping the emailed link signs in Safari, not the icon, because an iPhone keeps the two apart. Instead, 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.

Typing one in: The + button in the navbar is where things get created — Add Recipe, Import Recipes, Create Menu, and Finish Drafts (see Drafts). Add Recipe is the form: title, description, ingredients, steps, and optional extras (equipment, prep/cook times, servings, photos, categories and tags, a Background Story). Two things worth knowing before you save:

• The title is permanent: Once a recipe is saved, its name can't be changed — the title becomes part of the recipe's web address. Everything else stays editable forever, so just double-check the spelling before that first save.
• You don't have to finish in one sitting: Save Draft, next to Save Recipe, keeps whatever you've typed so far — even just a title — and puts it under + → Finish Drafts to pick back up later. A draft isn't a recipe: it's private, it isn't in your cookbook, and its name can still change.
• Leaving asks first: Once you've typed something, a link, Cancel or Back asks Leave Without Saving? Keep Editing takes you back to the form as you left it; Leave throws your changes away.
• Ingredients are flexible: Quantities take fractions (“1 1/2”), ranges (put 3 in the amount and 4 in Up to), informal amounts (“a pinch”), or “to taste.” Amounts are written the way measuring cups and spoons are marked: fractions like “7/8 cup” or “1 1/2 teaspoons,” not decimals like “0.9.” Cups and teaspoons also take thirds (“1/3 cup,” “2/3 teaspoon”). Metric keeps its decimals (“2.5 ml,” “1.25 kg”), and a can size like “14.5 oz” is fine. If an amount isn't one a measuring cup or spoon can show, the form tells you what it will take instead. You can also leave the quantity empty for something with no set amount — oil for frying, spray for the pan, whipped cream for serving. That line reads as just the ingredient and whatever note you added, like “oil, to coat the pan.” It's different from to taste, which means you'll taste it and decide: salt and pepper are to taste, frying oil isn't. For something that comes in a package, pick the container — can, jar, bottle, box, bag, carton and so on — and a Size box appears if you want to be specific. Type 28 oz and the recipe reads “1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes,” the way a cookbook writes it. Two different sizes of the same thing never get added together on your shopping list. You can group ingredients and steps under labels like “For the sauce.”

Importing from a website: The + button's second entry, Import Recipes, takes a recipe's web address and fills the Add form in for you — ingredients, steps, times, servings, categories — from most major recipe sites. A few things it deliberately doesn't copy: the photo, the written description, and the site's own headnotes (those belong to the original site). You'll type your own title, and you can edit everything it imported before saving.

Importing several websites at once: On that same Import Recipes screen, the middle section takes a whole list — paste up to twenty recipe web addresses, one per line, and each is fetched in turn while you watch. Nothing is saved yet: you land on a review screen listing everything found, where you can rename anything, drop what you don't want, and write the one thing a recipe brought in from a website always needs before it can be saved — a short description in your own words. Anything that couldn't be fetched is named there too, with the reason, rather than quietly disappearing.

Amounts are checked too: If an ingredient on the review screen has an amount like “0.85 cup,” that recipe is flagged and can't be imported until you sort it out. You'll see the line as written and, where it can, the nearest kitchen amount as a button — “Use 7/8.” Nothing changes unless you press it, and you can leave the recipe out of the import instead. An import never converts units: a recipe written in milliliters stays in milliliters.

Bringing your whole recipe box from another app: The last section of the same screen takes 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. Export from that app, upload the file here, and you get the same review screen: everything it found, editable, with nothing saved until you confirm. It handles a whole recipe box in one go — hundreds of recipes at a time.

Your photos come too — and you decide, recipe by recipe. Export files from Paprika, Copy Me That and Recipe Keeper carry your photos inside them, and the review screen asks one question about each recipe with three answers. Recipe is mine brings everything across, photo included. Recipe is not mine, but the photo is brings the photo and leaves the description for you to write — that's the one for a recipe you found somewhere and then cooked and photographed yourself. Recipe is not mine brings the ingredients and steps only. There's a “set all” control at the top, so a big box is one decision and a few corrections rather than one per recipe.

Why we ask: ingredients and steps are facts and always come across. A description someone else wrote is their writing, and a photo someone else took is their picture — so those two only travel when you tell us they're yours. Photos are unpacked and resized in your own browser before anything is sent, and an export that only publishes a link to a photo rather than the photo itself is always declined.

Nothing is created until you say so. For both of the bulk routes above, the import is all-or-nothing: if any recipe can't be saved — usually because the name is already taken — none of them are, and you come back to the review screen with all your edits still there and only the named ones to fix. That's deliberate: a recipe's name can't be changed after it is created, so half an import landing would leave you with recipes you can't rename.

When a site won't let us fetch it: Some sites ask automated tools not to read their pages, and we respect that — so an import from one of those will politely refuse. When it does, you'll be offered a second way: open the page in your own browser, copy its source, and paste it in. That reads exactly the same recipe information a URL import would, so it only works on pages that publish their ingredients and steps in a structured way — it can't read a recipe out of an article written as prose.

Imported recipes stay private — permanently: Because the content came from someone else's website, an imported recipe is locked to Private: it can't be made Public, can't be shared, and can't be copied with Make It My Way. It's your personal reference copy. Everything else works normally — cook it, print it, add it to your shopping list, take notes on it.

Photos: Add up to ten photos per recipe, each with a built-in crop and rotate step so it frames nicely on the recipe cards. The first one is the photo that represents the recipe everywhere else in the app — on cards, in search results, and at the top of the recipe itself. To choose a different one, reorder them: drag a photo by its handle, or use the arrows on each photo to move it earlier or later.

You can connect Claude to your own cookbook. Once connected, you can ask it things like “what can I make with the chicken and spinach I have?” or “add Mom's lasagna to my shopping list”, and it can write up a recipe you dictate to it.

You start in Claude, not here. There is no code to copy and nothing to paste but an address — Claude sends you to this site to say yes, and that is the whole setup. It works on a phone or a tablet as well as a computer.

1. On this site, open Manage Profile and find Connect Claude. Copy the server address shown there. That is the only thing you need to bring with you.
2. In Claude, go to Settings → Connectors and choose Add custom connector. Paste the address where it asks for the URL, and save. Leave everything else alone — you do not need any of the advanced settings.
3. Claude will open this site and ask you to sign in, if you aren't already. If you are, it skips straight past.
4. You'll see a page asking whether to let Claude use your cookbook, with a list of what it will be able to do. Press Allow, and Claude takes it from there.
5. Ask Claude something about your recipes to check it worked.

Two things worth knowing. A free Claude account can have one custom connector at a time, so if you already have another one you'll need to remove it first. And signing in here is easier if you do it before you start: open this site and sign in, and the connection is then a single Allow with no email to wait for.

Claude is the one we've tested. Other assistants may be able to connect the same way, but we haven't tried them. 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; whether a paid plan differs is unknown. Alexa isn't supported yet. If you get one working, or stuck, the Support page is the place to say so.

What Claude can and can't do once connected. Ten things in all — three it can look up, and seven it can change.

It can look things up: search and read any recipe you can already see, and read your shopping list.

Nothing gets saved without you: a new recipe, or changes to one of your own, only ever become a draft. That is true whether Claude thought of it or you did — dictating a recipe to Claude, or asking it to write up something you describe, goes to the same place. Drafts wait in Finish Drafts until you open them and save them. A change to one of your recipes leaves the original untouched until you press Replace Original, check the changes and press Save Recipe.

It writes amounts the way the form takes them: fractions like “7/8 cup,” not “0.9 cup.” If it writes one that isn't a kitchen amount, the app turns the suggestion back and tells Claude which line and what would work, so it can try again. Anything that reaches Finish Drafts already follows the rule.

But it can 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 these changes a recipe's words, and you can undo every one of them yourself — but they are real changes.

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 with anyone, or touch your account, your Family or your menus.

You can disconnect at any time, from the same place on Manage Profile, and it loses access immediately. That page also shows when each connection was last used — worth a glance now and then, since it's how you'd notice one being used by somebody who isn't you.

A draft is a recipe that isn't a recipe yet. It doesn't appear in your cookbook, nobody else can see it, and nothing about it is permanent — including the name, which is normally fixed forever once a recipe is saved. Drafts live under the + button, as Finish Drafts, and the little number on + is how many are waiting. You can have twenty waiting at once; past that, finish or discard one before starting another.

They arrive three ways, and the differences matter.

• You saved one yourself. The Add Recipe form has a Save Draft button next to Save Recipe. Press it whenever you like — a title and nothing else is a perfectly good draft — and pick it back up later from Finish Drafts. Half-typed is the point: a quantity you hadn't finished and a step that stops mid-sentence come back exactly as you left them.
• It came through Claude. If you've connected Claude (Manage Profile → Connect Claude), anything written through it lands here — whether Claude proposed the recipe or you dictated one and asked it to write it up. Either way it is a suggestion: Claude cannot add anything to your cookbook itself — see Connecting Claude for everything it can and can't do.
• A CHANGE to a recipe you already have, made through Claude. Again, it does not matter whose idea it was — asking Claude to halve the salt is your change, written up by it. This is the second kind, and it behaves differently from the other two. It is a copy of your recipe with the changes applied, sitting beside the original — your recipe is untouched until you save it. Replace Original opens your recipe's edit form with the changes filled in; check them, and press Save Recipe. Only then does anything change. Leave the form without saving and your recipe stays as it was, with the suggestion still waiting in Finish Drafts.
• If the recipe moved in the meantime, you'll be warned. A suggestion made last week might be based on a version you have since edited. When that has happened the page says so — “Careful — this recipe changed after these suggestions were made” — because replacing the original would otherwise quietly throw away the edit you made yourself. There is no version history to recover from, so the warning is the safeguard.

Nothing is saved until you say so. This is the part worth remembering: a suggestion sits as a draft until you open it, read it, and press Save to My Recipes. Until then it is not a recipe, it is not in your cookbook, and it isn't visible to anyone — including anyone you share recipes with. If it's wrong or you simply don't want it, throw it away and nothing was ever created.

Any draft can be thrown away, whichever way it arrived. Open it from Finish Drafts and you'll find Throw Away with the other buttons — on something you started yourself and put down, on a suggestion from Claude, and on a proposed change to a recipe you already have. It only removes the draft: a proposed change never touched the original, so throwing it away leaves your recipe exactly as it was. There is no undo and nothing goes to a bin, so it asks first.

Whose recipe is it? That question is yours to answer. When you review a suggestion you'll see three choices — the recipe is mine, the recipe isn't mine but the photo is, and the recipe isn't mine. It decides what gets kept: your own recipe imports everything, while somebody else's brings the ingredients and steps but not the written description, which belongs to whoever wrote it. An assistant never answers this for you. The form starts on the recipe is mine, because it has to start somewhere — so this is the one control on the screen worth reading twice before you confirm. It's a question about where the recipe came from, and you're the one who knows.

When you confirm a suggestion it's saved as private, whatever it came from. If you want to publish it or share it with your Family, that's a separate choice you make afterwards on the recipe's own page — see Sharing & Privacy.

Browse: Cookbook in the navbar holds everything you can read — Recipes, Menus, My Recipe Library, and Cook From Pantry. Recipes opens on Public Recipes, which is the family's shared shelf: every recipe anybody has made Public, and exactly the same list for every member. Showing (at the top on a computer, inside Filters on a phone) narrows the same grid four ways: Public (the shared shelf; choose Mine under Show to see only the ones you put there), Mine (everything you created, with Public and Private filters of its own), Family (Private recipes shared with a Family you're in), and Favorites. Switching between them doesn't leave the page, and each one has its own web address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked or sent to someone.

Every card looks the same whichever filter you're on — photo, title, star rating, and a heart you can tap to favorite right from the card.

Favorites holds what is still shared with you: A heart is a bookmark, not a key. If the owner of a recipe you favorited stops sharing it, it drops out of your Favorites, and a quiet line tells you how many — “2 of your favorites are on recipes no longer shared with you” — without naming the recipes or their cooks. Tap Remove Them (or Remove It, if there's just one) on that line if you'd rather the count went away. Favorite Menus behaves the same way.

Search: The magnifying glass in the navbar searches your whole cookbook — recipes and menus together — by name, without leaving the page you're on. Results are grouped so you can see which is which. It only ever shows things you're allowed to open: somebody else's private menu never appears, even if you type its name exactly.

Filtering the recipe grid: The search box on that page matches recipe titles, ingredients, tags, meals, cuisines, diets, and cooks' names — and it's forgiving: “brocolli” still finds Broccoli, and “tomatoes” finds a recipe that says “tomato.”

Filters: The sidebar narrows by Meal, Cuisine, Diet, Ingredient, Tags, and Cook — type a few letters in any of them and pick from the matches. There's also a Rating button that shows only recipes rated four stars and up. Filters stack, so “Dinner + Chicken” works the way you'd hope.

Sorting: Newest is the default; you can switch to Top Rated, Most Popular (most-cooked), or alphabetical.

Sharing a filtered view: Your filters and sort live in the page address, so you can copy it straight from your browser's address bar and send it to another member — handy for “here are all the soup recipes.”

Your Library: My Recipe Library — under Cookbook in the menu — is a table view of every recipe you've created, plus the ones you've favorited that are still shared with you — good for managing your whole collection at a glance (ratings, cook history, visibility) rather than browsing by photo.

Searches you've run before: Tap the search box on the Recipes page, or the magnifying glass in the menu bar, and your recent searches appear underneath — tap one to run it again (on the Recipes page, filters and all). There's nothing to save: a search is remembered when you actually open a recipe from it, in either box, so half-typed words and dead ends never clutter the list. It keeps the last ten. To wipe them, use Clear Search History on Manage Profile.

Cooking from what you have: Under Cookbook, Cook From Pantry works the other way round: list what's in the kitchen and it finds recipes for it. Add amounts if you like and it'll tell you where you'd come up short. Choose how strict to be — only what you listed, a few things missing, or anything that uses one of them. Nothing you type there is saved.

Telling us what you own: The account menu has My Kitchen Equipment — everything any recipe mentions, with a checkbox beside each. Check what you have. It's private to you, and you only need to do it once, since equipment doesn't change the way food in a cupboard does.

Scaling: The 1X/2X/3X buttons above the ingredients rescale every amount instantly. Amounts display as everyday fractions with full unit names, and a recipe keeps the unit it was written in — tablespoons stay tablespoons and cups stay cups, so 6 cups of broth reads “6 cups,” “12 cups,” “18 cups.” Teaspoons are the one exception: they become tablespoons only when the amount is a whole number of tablespoons, so 3 teaspoons reads “1 tablespoon” but 4 teaspoons stays “4 teaspoons.” An amount is always one unit, never “1 cup plus 2 tablespoons,” and a cup, tablespoon or quart is always shown just as you typed it, even an amount like 1 1/8 cups. An amount written as a range always shows both ends in the same unit, chosen by the smaller end — “2-3 teaspoons,” never “2 teaspoons to 1 tablespoon.”

Dry things stop at cups; liquids keep their quarts: Nobody measures flour in quarts, so a quart or a gallon of a dry ingredient reads in cups — “8 cups flour,” not “2 quarts.” A liquid you wrote in quarts stays in quarts, and a gallon of one reads as quarts. You don't set this anywhere; the app already knows which ingredients pour. Anything it hasn't been told about stays in cups, which is the safer of the two. The shopping list is different, because it's for buying: it adds amounts up across recipes and may switch to a bigger unit, so 3 cups plus 3 cups of stock reads “1 1/2 quarts.” A liquid whose total isn't a whole number of quarts also says how many to buy, rounded up — “2 1/2 quarts (buy 3)” — and for a range it counts from the larger number, so you don't come home short. A small total that doesn't land on a measuring size of a bigger unit stays in the smaller one — “4 teaspoons,” never “1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon” — and a big one, like 18 tablespoons, says “about” and rounds up to an amount you can measure (“about 1 1/4 cups”), so you never come home short.

Weights stay in the unit you typed: If you write a package size in ounces, it stays in ounces however much you scale it — three 6-ounce bags of baby carrots reads “18 ounces,” not “1 1/8 pounds,” which is not a weight anybody sets a scale to. If you write pounds, you get pounds. Fresh meat and produce are sold by the pound and packages are labeled in ounces, so whichever you reached for is almost always the one you want back. On the shopping list, where amounts from several recipes get added together, the total uses the larger of the units anyone typed — and only lands on a quarter, half or three-quarter pound, since those are the ones you can actually weigh out.

Cook Mode: The big filled button. It opens a clean, full-screen view that shows one step at a time in large text with Next/Back buttons — and keeps your screen from going to sleep while you cook.

Grams and milliliters work too: If a recipe uses metric — common on British and European sites — it imports and displays just as it was written: 250 ml, 1.5 kg. You can pick those units yourself in the recipe form as well, and metric keeps its decimals (2.5 ml, 1.25 kg) where cups and spoons take fractions. One thing worth knowing: the app never converts between metric and cups or ounces, because the conversion isn't exact and a recipe is not the place to round. So if one recipe wants grams and another wants ounces, your shopping list shows both on one line, joined with a plus — “8 ounces + 250 g Butter.”

Cooking two things at once: Inside Cook Mode, Add Dish puts another recipe alongside the first — a protein and a side, up to four. On a phone you tap between them; on a big screen they sit side by side. Each keeps its own place, so moving to the side and back doesn't lose where you were in the main dish. Your place is in the address, so a reload or a locked phone brings you back to the same steps.

Log Meal: This is a one-tap “I cooked this” — it feeds the “Cooked nX” counter everyone sees and your own “By You” count. It's separate from a review. The more a meal is logged, the more popular it is and the higher up it will display when sorting by Most Popular. Because that counter decides what ranks highly, each recipe can be logged once every 24 hours — the button grays out until then and says when it's available again. Backfilling an older date from your Cook Log isn't limited, so catching up on a week you forgot to log still works.

Reviews: A star rating with optional text, and you can add one photo — a picture of how yours turned out. You get one review per recipe; reviewing again updates yours rather than piling up duplicates, photo included. The rating at the top of the page is everyone's average.

Comments: A discussion section at the bottom — ask a question, get replies. Comments and replies can each carry one photo too, which is the easiest way to show what you mean. You can edit or delete your own comments, and editing lets you change or remove the photo. When there are new comments on your recipes, a red dot appears on the Cookbook button in the navbar (on a phone, on the menu button), and the number of new ones shows beside My Recipe Library in the Cookbook menu. If anyone has replied to your comment, deleting it leaves a short “This comment was removed” line in its place, so the replies underneath still make sense — your words and your photo are gone either way, and your name comes off it. With no replies, the comment simply disappears.

Reviews, ratings and comments live on Public recipes: A Private recipe doesn't have them — not your own, not a copy you saved, not one shared with a Family. The tools there are the cook log and your private notes, which is what a recipe only you can read actually needs. If an owner makes a recipe Private after people have written on it, nothing is deleted: what was written goes quiet, stays readable by the owner, and comes back for everyone if the recipe is made Public again. If you can still open the recipe through your Family, your own review and comments stay visible to you on its page, under What You Wrote, where you can remove them.

Made This: Every time you tap Log Meal, it's recorded here with the date — and you can add a photo of how yours turned out plus a note about anything you changed.Your cook photos are private to you and your family by default, even on a public recipe, because a picture of your kitchen isn't the same thing as a recipe. If you want to show it off, each cook has a Show this on the recipe publicly checkbox — off unless you turn it on, one cook at a time. (If the recipe itself is private, checking that still only means you.)

About those photos: a photo you add to a review or a comment belongs to you, and it appears on that recipe for anyone who can see the recipe. Deleting your review or comment deletes its photo with it. One photo each, deliberately — enough to show your result without turning a discussion into an album.

My Notes: This is your private notepad on any recipe — nobody else can ever see it, not even the recipe's owner. It saves by itself as you type. (Don't confuse it with Background Story, which is written by the recipe's owner and visible to everyone — that's where “Grandma's recipe from 1985” lives.)

Make It My Way: This copies any recipe you can see into your own editable version — your copy starts out Private and appears as a “Variation” connected to the original. If you own both and decide your version is now the definitive one, “Promote to Main Version” swaps them. One rule worth knowing: a copy of a recipe that was only ever shared with a Family stays Private permanently, because copying something should never share it more widely than its owner did.

Keeping someone else's recipe: Save a Copy keeps it as it is; Make It My Way opens the editor so you can change it. It's the answer to “what if this stops being shared?” — the copy is yours, starts out Private, credits the original with a “Saved from” line, and stays even if the original is later made private or deleted. The offer to save one appears once, after you cook, favorite or queue the recipe.

If you make an unchanged copy Public while the original is still shared, you'll be asked to confirm — that puts two of the same recipe on the shelf.

Cooks are counted honestly. An unchanged copy is still the same dish, so cooking it counts on the original, and the copy's page shows the original's number and says so. Change the copy and it becomes its own dish, counting from zero — the original can then show “plus N× from saved versions” as a separate number.

Linked recipes: A recipe can link to its components (a pie linking to its own crust recipe), and the page shows connections in both directions.

Print: This opens a clean, ink-friendly copy — printing to paper or saving as a PDF, at whatever scale (1X/2X/3X) you've selected.

Every recipe is Public or Private: Public means every member can find and view it. Private means it's yours alone — it doesn't appear in anyone else's browsing or search, and there's no padlock icon announcing it exists.

You can see a recipe for as long as its owner shares it: Public Recipes is the family's shared shelf, and it's the same shelf for everyone. If an owner makes a recipe Private, hides it, or leaves the site, it comes off that shelf for everybody at once — cooking it, favoriting it or reviewing it doesn't hold a copy back for you. That takes effect immediately, and the owner is told first how many people it affects.

Your own history stays yours: a recipe going away never edits your records. Your cook log still says you cooked it, and when, and everything you've written stays in your Export My Data file. What you lose is the recipe itself — the ingredients and the steps.

Removing what you wrote on it: Your reviews, comments, cook logs and private notes on recipes you can no longer open are listed on Manage Profile under No Longer Shared With You, along with your reviews and cook logs on menus you can no longer open. Each one shows what you wrote, not which recipe it was on — that stays private to its owner. Remove anything you'd rather not keep, one at a time; it can't be undone. The section only appears when there's something in it.

So if a recipe matters to you, keep your own copy while you can see it. The page offers Save a Copy once — right after you cook, favorite, or shopping-list something of somebody else's — and it takes one tap. A copy is yours for good: it's born Private, carries a “Saved from” line saying where it came from, and nothing its original owner does later can take it back. See The Recipe Page.

Hiding a recipe: For a recipe you own that you'd rather not see at all anymore (a duplicate, a test, a mistake), My Recipe Library offers a Hide option on recipes that are already Private. Hiding tucks it out of every browsing screen — including your own — while keeping it safely in your Library, where an Unhide button brings it back anytime. Nothing is ever deleted.

Sharing a recipe with someone outside the site: The Share button creates a special link you can text, email, or hand off however you like:

• A member who clicks it lands on the real recipe page, as usual.
• Anyone else sees a read-only preview — the full recipe, photo and all, with a note saying who shared it. They can't join on their own, but they can use Ask to Join to send you a request. Nothing happens until you approve it from Invite Friend in the account menu. That way nobody you forwarded a link to can join in your name without you knowing.
• The link expires after 7 days. Sharing the same recipe again just renews your same link's clock. And if you make the recipe Private, every outstanding link to it stops working instantly. A link that hasn't expired works again if the recipe goes back to Public.
• Only Public recipes can be shared — the Share dialog will offer to make a Private recipe Public first.

What the site keeps about you: what it collects, who can see it, how long it's kept and how to get a copy are all in the Privacy Notice.

A Family is a small group inside the site you can share Private recipes with, without making them Public to everyone. Create one from the account menu, then add people by email address from the My Family screen.

You can give your Family a name when you create it, or add one later from the same screen — everyone in the Family sees it, and the owner or any admin can change it. It's just a label: names don't have to be unique, nothing else changes when you rename, and leaving it blank is fine.

Adding someone and sharing a recipe are two separate steps. Adding a person lets them see recipes you share, but it doesn't share anything on its own. To share a recipe, open it from Cookbook → Recipes, with Mine chosen under Showing, and turn on the Family toggle — the one with the people icon, sitting next to Public/Private. It's one recipe at a time, and the toggle only appears on a recipe's own page, so there's nothing to switch on while browsing.

Everything shared this way collects under Family Recipes. You can only share recipes you added yourself, and turning the toggle back off takes the recipe out of your Family's view again straight away — the same as making a recipe Private, and you'll be told first how many people that affects. Anyone who wanted to hold on to it needed to save their own copy while it was shared; a copy of a Family-shared recipe is theirs to keep, but stays Private permanently.

If someone you add isn't a member yet, they get an invite instead and join your Family automatically once they accept.

You can be in more than one Family. You might be in your own and also in a partner's or a friend's. You can only ever create one, though. When you belong to two or more, the Family button on a recipe becomes a short list so you can pick exactly which Families to share it with — nothing is shared until you check one, and you can share with one and not another.

Leaving a Family. If you joined someone else's Family, you can leave it from the My Family screen. It always asks first, and tells you what changes: you lose access to the Private recipes shared with that Family — all of them, including ones you cooked or favorited — and any of your own recipes shared with it stop being shared. The person who created a Family can't leave it — it would be left with nobody in charge — but they can hand it over.

Admins, if you'd rather not do it all yourself. From My Family you can make any member an admin. An admin can add members, remove members, and rename the Family. Only you, as the person who created it, can choose admins, remove an admin, or hand the Family over — so nobody can quietly make themselves in charge.

Handing a Family over. Use Make Owner next to someone's name. They take over everything you can do, you stay a member and keep all your recipes — but you can't take it back yourself afterwards. Only the new owner can hand it back to you. They need to be an active member who hasn't created a Family of their own.

What a menu is: A named group of recipes you cook together — a Thanksgiving spread, a BBQ, a dinner party. Build it once and it's there next year. Menus are yours alone unless you choose to share one.

Making one: the + button → Create Menu. Give it a name, then search and tap recipes to add them. The picker starts on Everything I Can See — your own recipes whether they're Public or Private, plus everyone else's Public ones and anything shared with your Family — and the dropdown narrows it to just one of those. Picking Public Recipes is the one to use if you plan to make the menu Public later, since a menu can only be made Public when every recipe in it already is. Everything saves together when you press Create Menu, in the bar along the bottom of the window. A menu holds up to twenty recipes — enough for a big holiday spread, and the screen tells you when you've reached it.

Finding them again: Cookbook → Menus, which works the same way Recipes does: one screen with filters across the top for All (everyone's public menus), Mine, Shared With Me, and Favorites. Each menu shows as a card using the photo from the first recipe in it that has one.

The buttons on a menu: They float along the bottom of the page, like a recipe page's, and show icons only on a smaller screen. Anyone who can open a menu gets Log Meal, Favorite, and Shopping List, which lets you choose how much of each dish to add to your shopping list. A public menu also has Review.

Changing one: On a menu of your own, the bar adds Share, Add Recipes, Rename, and More → Delete Menu, and the Public/Private switch sits beside “Created by you” under its name. Remove any recipe with the × on its card. Deleting a menu never deletes the recipes in it.

A menu somebody shared with you: You can say no thanks. Under Shared With Me, each card has an × in its top corner that takes the menu off your screen for good; it asks you to confirm first. It doesn't delete anything — the menu is still theirs and they still have it — and they aren't told. If you want it back, they would have to share it with you again.

Saving one and keeping count: The heart on a menu's card, or Favorite on the menu itself, saves it to your favorites — a bookmark, nothing more. Press Log Meal on a menu the day you cook the whole thing, and the card starts showing how many times it's been cooked, with your own count beside it on the menu page. You can log the same menu once every 24 hours.

Rating a menu: On a public menu, tap Review or the stars under its name to leave a rating out of five and, if you like, a note. You can change it or take it down later, and you can rate your own menus — same as recipes. A private menu takes no new ratings: any it already has still show under its name, and it opens for rating again once it's public. Menus with ratings can be sorted by Top Rated on Public Menus.

Finding other people's menus: Cookbook → Menus opens on Public Menus: every menu anyone has made public, with who built it. To put one of yours there, open it and switch it from Private to Public — you can only do that when every recipe in it is public too. Favorite Menus collects everything you've hearted, your own and other people's. If someone makes a menu private again, or stops sharing it with you, it quietly drops off that list, and a short line says how many of your favorites are on menus no longer shared with you — no names, no titles. Recipes work the same way.

Taking a menu back: If anyone has hearted, reviewed or logged cooking one of your public menus, switching it back to Private asks you to confirm first, and tells you how many people that is. They lose it — it disappears from their Favorite Menus, and anything they wrote is kept out of sight until you make it public again, though they can still remove their own from Manage Profile. Anyone you shared it with directly keeps it either way. A menu nobody else has touched just goes private with no fuss.

Adding a recipe you're already looking at: On any recipe page, More → Add to Menu. Check any of your menus to add it, uncheck to take it out, or name a brand-new menu right there.

Sharing a menu: Open a menu of yours, tap Share, and enter someone's email address. They can see the menu but not change it. If they're not on the site yet, they get an invite — and the menu is waiting for them once they join. A Public menu also has a link, and anyone can share that one, not just whoever made the menu: tap Share on it and send the link however you like. It opens for anyone who's a member here.

What they'll actually see: Sharing a menu doesn't share the recipes in it. Anything private stays private, so they may see fewer dishes than you do — the Share window tells you up front how many of yours are private. You can stop sharing at any time from the same window, and they can remove a shared menu from their own Menus page.

A menu is a list of pointers, not copies: if the owner of a dish in it stops sharing that dish, it drops out of the menu for everyone who isn't its owner, with the same quiet count rather than an empty space. Nothing about the menu itself breaks, and the dish comes back if it's shared again. On a menu of your own, that line also offers Remove Them (or Remove It), which takes those dishes off the menu — the recipes themselves aren't touched.

Building a list: Your shopping list is the page everything is added from. The list icon in the navbar opens a short menu: choose View Shopping List (on a phone, it's under Shopping List in the menu at the top left). Across the top of the list you'll find three doors: Add Recipes (pick from everything you can see), Add From Meal Plan (everything on your week at once), and Add a Menu. You can also add a single recipe with one tap on the list icon on its own page. Each recipe can be added at 1X, 2X, or 3X.

Adding the same thing twice is safe — nothing doubles. A recipe is either on your list or it isn't, so adding a menu that overlaps what you already had just fills in the gaps, and a quantity you turned up to 2X stays at 2X.

The combined list does the math: All the ingredients from all your queued recipes merge into one list: three recipes that each need onions become one onion line with the total, amounts convert to sensible units, and everything is grouped by grocery-store aisle in walking order — Produce first, and anything not yet given an aisle last, under Unsorted.

Make it match your kitchen: Uncheck anything you already have on hand (it stays visible, crossed out, for this list only), or tap the pencil on any line to set your own quantity. Amounts here follow the same kitchen-fraction rule as a recipe: “7/8 cup” works and “0.9 cup” is turned back with a note on what would.

Extra Items: Need bread, or sliced turkey, or anything that isn't part of a recipe? Add it in the Extra items section — with or without an amount, written the same way as in a recipe (“2 1/2 onions”). If a recipe on your list already needs the same ingredient, the amounts combine automatically.

Meal Plan: Under the Shopping List menu, the Meal Plan page lets you lay out your week: add a day, attach recipes to it, repeat. The same recipe can appear on more than one day, and you can even have two separate “Sunday” rows (this Sunday and next Sunday). When you're ready, one Add to Shopping List button queues everything from your plan — it only adds what isn't already on your list, and never disturbs the list you've already built.

Sharing the list: The Share button on the list sends it wherever you like — your phone's share sheet, copy-to-clipboard, or email.

Shopping in the store: Open your list and tap Shop This List (or choose Shopping Mode from the list icon's menu). Tap anything to check it into your cart — it grays out and stays where it is, so your aisle order never shuffles under you while you're walking. Checked items are saved, so you can lock your phone, or start on one device and finish on another. When you're done, Done Shopping clears the list ready for next week — it asks first, because that empties the whole list and can't be undone.