Recipe Notes

Add recipes to your Obsidian vault by answering a few questions, one at a time. Each recipe becomes a note with its ingredients, steps, and an ingredient checklist, and appears in an overview note (a "recipe MOC") with a table of every recipe. Link recipes that go well together to put a meal together.

Built for both typing in a family recipe and pasting one from a website: pasted lists are tidied up for you.

Features

• A step-by-step window (ribbon icon or Create recipe note): name, who it's from, a link, a description, course and genre, servings, prep and cook time, ingredients, instructions, tags, recipes it goes well with, a photo, and notes. Back, Skip, and Next on every step, a progress line, and a review screen before anything is saved. Only the name is required.
• Pasting is tidied up: bullets, checkboxes, 1., 1), and Step 1: numbering, extra blank lines, and stray spaces are removed. Instructions are numbered for you.
• Ingredients in groups (Protein, Carbs, Veggies, Spices, Other by default; editable). Each group has rows of name and amount, Add another, and a Paste a list box that splits lines such as onion: 1 unit or 2 cups rice into rows. Ingredient names you've used before are suggested.
• Times the way you type them: 45, 1:15, 1h15, or 1 hr 15 min. The total is added up.
• Goes well with: pick other recipes from a searchable list. They're saved as real links (updated when a recipe is renamed, shown in the graph and backlinks), and optionally added to both recipes. Edit pairings changes the list later, also for recipes you wrote before installing the plugin.
• An ingredient checklist in every note, written from the recipe's properties. Rebuild ingredient checklist rewrites it (and unticks every box after cooking), and adds one to older recipe notes.
• A recipe MOC with a Dataview table of every recipe: one column per ingredient group, course, servings, total time, and pairings. Created on first use and never overwritten; Regenerate recipe table rebuilds only the table, and can replace a table you made yourself.
• Works with recipe notes you already have that store ingredients as ingredients → group → type → name: amount, as well as simpler top-level lists. The table is written so that no recipe can drop out of it, whatever a note contains.
• A photo from a web address (downloaded once into your vault) or an image already in your vault.
• Your own template, with the same {{variables}} as the built-in one.
• Made for desktop and mobile (so far tested on desktop). Nothing is ever renamed, moved, deleted, or overwritten.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.13.0 or newer.
• The Dataview plugin for the recipe MOC's table (Community plugins → Dataview). Everything else works without it. The plugin says so when Dataview is missing or turned off.

Installation

From Community plugins: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for Recipe Notes → Install → Enable. Its page in the directory: community.obsidian.md/plugins/recipe-notes.

By hand: download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/recipe-notes/, then enable Recipe Notes in Settings → Community plugins.

Quick start

1. In Settings → Recipe Notes, check the folders (defaults: Recipes, with notes in Recipes/All Recipes).
2. Click the chef's hat in the ribbon and answer the questions. Skip anything you don't know yet.
3. On the review screen, click Save recipe. The note opens, and the recipe MOC (Recipes/Recipe MOC.md) is created with its table the first time.

Commands

Edit pairings and Rebuild ingredient checklist are offered only when the open note is in the recipe notes folder.

The questions

• If a recipe with that name already exists (ignoring capitals, quote styles, and subfolders), you can Open existing, Create copy (Beef Hash 2.md), or Cancel.
• Closing the window with answers in it (Escape, ×, a click outside) asks before throwing them away.
• Enter moves to the next step in one-line boxes; Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac) in boxes for several lines.

The recipe note

With the built-in template, a made-up recipe looks like this:

---
tags: ["weeknight"]
Course: ["entree"]
Genre: comfort food
ingredients:
  Protein:
    type:
      ground beef: 1 lb
  Carbs:
    type:
      potatoes: 2 medium
  Veggies:
    type:
      onion: 1 unit
  Spices:
    type:
      smoked paprika: 1 tsp
  Other:
    type:
Servings: 4
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes
Total Cooking Time: 40 minutes
From: Grandma
Source URL: "https://example.com/beef-hash"
Goes well with: ["[[Lemon Green Beans]]"]
Photo: "[[Beef Hash.jpg]]"
created: "2026-11-04 18:30:00"
links: ["[[Recipe MOC]]"]
---
# Overview
![[Beef Hash.jpg|400]]

A quick, cheap weeknight hash.

**From:** [Grandma](https://example.com/beef-hash) · **Servings:** 4 · **Prep:** 15 minutes · **Cook:** 25 minutes · **Total:** 40 minutes
**Goes well with:** `= this["Goes well with"]`

## Ingredients
%% recipe-notes:checklist:start (made from the ingredients properties: "Rebuild ingredient checklist" rewrites this part) %%
### Protein
- [ ] ground beef: 1 lb
### Carbs
- [ ] potatoes: 2 medium
### Veggies
- [ ] onion: 1 unit
### Spices
- [ ] smoked paprika: 1 tsp
%% recipe-notes:checklist:end %%

## Instructions
1. Dice the potatoes and brown them.
2. Add the beef and onion.
3. Season and serve.

## Notes
Keeps in the fridge for three days.

• Skipped questions stay empty, never none or N/A; an empty ingredient group is an empty type:.
• Times are written as text such as 1 hour 15 minutes, which Dataview reads as a length of time.
• The ingredient properties are the source: the MOC table reads them, and the checklist is written from them. To change an ingredient, edit the properties and run Rebuild ingredient checklist. Text you type between the checklist's markers is replaced on the next rebuild.
• The "Goes well with" line is an inline Dataview query, so it always shows the current list.

Goes well with

• With Add pairings to both recipes on (the default), picking Lemon Green Beans for Beef Hash also adds Beef Hash to Lemon Green Beans' list. The review screen names the other notes first.
• Edit pairings works the same way: newly ticked recipes get the link back, and unticking a recipe removes the link from that recipe too. A confirmation lists every change before anything is written.
• Only the "Goes well with" property changes in the other notes (Obsidian rewrites that note's properties block when saving, so spacing or quotes may change; values don't). The property is found whatever its capitals, and links that don't point to a note are kept.

The recipe MOC

{Recipes folder}/{Recipe MOC name}.md, created the first time you create a recipe or regenerate the table. It's found even if its name differs only in capital letters. If no note has that name but one in the recipes folder looks like a recipe MOC ("MOC" in its name, or a Dataview table that reads your recipe notes), the plugin asks whether to use it instead of creating a second one.

Regenerate recipe table replaces only the part between its two markers. In a MOC you made yourself with exactly one Dataview table, it offers to Replace that table (only that code block changes) or Add at the end. It also adds the class recipe-notes-moc to the note's cssclasses, which makes the note use the full width of its pane so the table fits.

The generated table with the default settings:

%% recipe-notes:start (generated: "Regenerate recipe table" replaces only the part between these markers) %%
```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID
  file.link AS Recipe,
  ldefault(list(ingredients).Protein.type[0], ldefault(list(ingredients).protein.type[0], Protein)) AS "Protein",
  ldefault(list(ingredients).Carbs.type[0], ldefault(list(ingredients).carbs.type[0], Carbs)) AS "Carbs",
  ldefault(list(ingredients).Veggies.type[0], ldefault(list(ingredients).veggies.type[0], Veggies)) AS "Veggies",
  ldefault(list(ingredients).Spices.type[0], ldefault(list(ingredients).spices.type[0], Spices)) AS "Spices",
  ldefault(list(ingredients).Other.type[0], ldefault(list(ingredients).other.type[0], Other)) AS "Other",
  Course AS Course,
  Servings AS Servings,
  row["Total Cooking Time"] AS "Total time",
  row["Goes well with"] AS "Goes well with"
FROM "Recipes/All Recipes"
SORT file.name ASC
```
%% recipe-notes:end %%

Why the ingredient columns look unusual: Dataview silently leaves out a row when one of its columns fails, and looking up a name inside plain text fails (for example Carbs: rice typed by hand). Wrapping the property in a one-item list (list(ingredients)) makes Dataview skip what fails instead, and [0] takes the value back out, so every recipe stays in the table. Each column also accepts the property name with its first letter in the other case (fats / Fats) and a top-level list of names. The columns follow the Ingredient groups setting; after changing groups, run Regenerate recipe table.

Settings

Missing folders are created on first use. The settings page also shows whether Dataview is installed and has a Regenerate recipe table button.

Templates

A template is a note with {{variables}}. In the properties, lists become list properties and numbers stay numbers; text is quoted only when YAML needs it. ingredients: {{ingredients}} writes the nested ingredient groups. Unknown variables are left as they are, so other template syntax survives.

Network use and privacy

The plugin goes online in one case only: when you give a photo's web address, it downloads that image once (with Obsidian's requestUrl) and saves it in your vault. Nothing else is sent anywhere; there's no telemetry and no account. Everything else happens in your vault.

Development

npm install
npm run dev        # rebuilds on every change and copies the build into test-vault/ (for the Hot Reload plugin)
npm run build      # type check and release build
npm run lint       # ESLint with eslint-plugin-obsidianmd
npm test           # tests with a stand-in for Obsidian and an in-memory vault; no network
npm run check:dataview -- "Recipes/Recipe MOC.md"   # runs a note's Dataview tables with test-vault's copy of Dataview and lists rows a table would drop

test-vault/ is a local Obsidian vault for trying the plugin; it isn't part of the repository.

License

MIT