Tips and Tricks

A grab-bag of practical tips for getting more out of Recipe Box.

Recipes

Use #IgnoreIngredient for staples. Tag “salt and pepper to taste” or pantry basics you never need to buy with #IgnoreIngredient so they stay visible in the recipe but never clutter your grocery list. This only affects ingredients that would be automatically added to the grocery list, not manually selected items.
Tag ingredients for category control. If the built-in dictionary keeps miscategorizing something, either add a #Category tag on that ingredient line (with Category source set to “Tag” or “Tag, then dictionary”) or add a category override - the override is less work if it’s an ingredient you’ll see across many recipes.
Write quantities Recipe Box can parse. Plain numbers, decimals, fractions (1/2, 1 1/2, ½), and “a/an” all parse correctly. Avoid burying the quantity mid-sentence if you want it to scale and aggregate cleanly.
Group ingredients and steps with subheadings (### For the sauce) for multi-component recipes - Recipe Box preserves these groupings in the recipe view.
Add a source link. Include source, url, or link in frontmatter for imported recipes - it shows up as a tappable link on mobile.
Use folders for one hierarchy, tags for the rest. A recipe can only live in one folder, but it can carry any number of tags - if you want a recipe to be both “Dinner” and “Pasta,” tag it rather than trying to force a folder structure to do both. Both are filterable in the Gallery View.

Sync after manual edits. If you edit the meal plan note by hand (rename a link, delete a row), run Sync grocery list from meal plan note so the grocery list catches up.
Use “By recipe” grouping before a big shop to sanity-check which recipe needs what, especially when scaling recipes up for a dinner party.
Use “By source” grouping to separate what your meal plan needs from what you’ve manually added.
Use Check all / Uncheck all at the start of a fresh shopping trip instead of clearing everything, if you want to keep your meal plan but start a clean shopping pass.
Dated meal plan/grocery notes (via Moment.js tokens) give you a running history of past weeks - handy for reviewing what you actually cooked.

Add notes while the memory is fresh. The Mark as cooked dialog has a notes field - use it to jot down what you changed, what worked, what didn’t. These notes are queryable from Dataview or Bases.
Query your cook history with Dataview. Because cook history is stored as a structured frontmatter array, you can build custom views: all recipes cooked in the last 30 days, recipes you’ve never made, your most-cooked meals. See the Dataview snippet in Meal Suggestions
Use Cook mode (sun icon in the recipe header’s overflow menu) to keep your screen awake while cooking - tap the icon in the tab header to turn it off when done.

The multiplier stepper moves in 0.5 increments and writes back to frontmatter, so a recipe stays scaled the next time you open it. Set it back to 1 to restore original quantities.
Nutrition and servings figures scale with the multiplier according to your Nutrition display/Nutrition source settings - double-check these are set correctly if your numbers look off after scaling.

High glycemic index and meat temperature warnings are independent toggles - enable one without the other.
Customize the GI dictionary rather than disabling diabetic mode entirely if only a few flagged ingredients don’t match your needs - you can comment out lines with #.

Because everything is Markdown with structured frontmatter, you can build dashboards with Dataview or Obsidian Bases on top of your recipe data:

The sample Recipe Index.base in this vault shows a starting point for Bases views.

Recipe Box’s plugin data (meal plan entries, one-off items, collapsed groups) is stored in the plugin’s own data file, separate from your notes - but the meal plan and grocery notes themselves are the source of truth for what’s displayed and can always be edited by hand.
All recipe data stays in your vault as plain Markdown. You can always access, search, back up, or share your recipes without the plugin installed.