时食记

People are increasingly reluctant to cook at home. The reason is obvious: modern society runs like a high-speed, precision machine. Working people have heavy workloads and frequent overtime, and they're already exhausted when they get home, with no energy to deal with kitchen chores. Ordering takeout or grabbing street snacks has become a helpless choice, but it comes with all kinds of health risks.

As a working stiff and a foodie, I've spent over a year looking for ways to eat healthier and save money. Below I'll share my explorations and gains from this period.

The Trigger

I'm a Beijing drifter, spending 2 hours commuting back and forth between the office and my rental via subway every day. After work during the day, I'd eat takeout while scrolling short videos in the evening, and days went by like this... Until one evening 2 years later, in February last year, something changed. My throat suddenly felt blocked, I couldn't eat or sleep. After going to the hospital for tests, I was diagnosed with chronic gastritis caused by H. pylori, and my mood plummeted instantly. At 23, my life had just started. I couldn't understand how I could get this illness. Even so, I had to keep taking my medication. While on the quadruple therapy regimen, I needed to eat light, avoid seafood and spicy food, and try not to order takeout. I learned that chronic gastritis is 30% treated with medicine and 70% cared for through diet. Since I couldn't order takeout anymore, what should I eat? Looking at my neighbor's small cast iron pot, I fell into deep thought... Cooking for myself!

The Three Big Hurdles

The idea sounded great, but three problems immediately stood in my way:

• What to eat?
• What ingredients to buy?
• How to cook it?

Exploring Recipe Apps and Random Decision Tools

As a total kitchen newbie who just stepped out of the starting village, I barely knew any recipes, so I had to rely on recipe apps like Xiachufang. No matter what I wanted to eat, I could search for it there. I used it for a while, but found it couldn't fully solve my problems:

What to eat? Xiachufang has a huge, comprehensive collection of all kinds of recipes, but that's both an advantage and a disadvantage. For someone like me with choice paralysis, it took forever to decide what to cook every time. How to cook it? As the saying goes, different people have different tastes. Recipes shared by others that taste amazing might not suit my preferences. I also wanted to put my own spin on some ingredients and cooking methods. I also tried random spinner apps like Xiaojueding, adding all the dishes I know how to cook to the options, then randomly picking one to make. But it couldn't save recipes... I thought if I could combine random selection with recipe management, that would be perfect:

• What to eat could be decided by random draw
• Ingredients needed could be added to the shopping list
• Recipes could be freely edited and managed Each of these needs has a few apps that do them really well, but there's no app that does all three at once... So I had to make it myself.

Ideal Feature Set

Food selection spinner

• Can distinguish between breakfast and dinner, and recommend different recipes accordingly
• Can filter recipes by cooking time, for when I want a quick bite or a hearty meal
• Can match recipes based on ingredients I already have in the fridge to avoid waste

  Grocery shopping and cooking

• Automatically add ingredients from the selected recipe to the shopping list
• Set timers for each step of the recipe, and get reminders when a step is done

Birth of Shishiji

After half a year of work, I finally turned the idea into reality, even if it doesn't look the best... I've been using it myself for a while, and it basically solves my problems. On my way home from work, I can randomly pick what to cook for tonight and tomorrow's breakfast, ingredients are automatically added to the shopping list, and I just need to buy the ingredients and cook when I get home.

Everyone is welcome to download and try it out, just search for 「时食记」 on the App Store. If you have any feature requests, feel free to leave a comment or send me a private message. I'll add suitable ones to the development plan, and I hope we can work together to make the app more useful.