FamCook helps you find the right answer – without the stress.
FamCook brings your whole cooking life together in one place: recipes from all sorts of sources, what everyone at the table likes, planning, portions and the shopping.
FamCook pulls it all together and does the maths. All you have to do is choose what goes on the table – and you have more time to cook.
Everyone in your group can record what they like, what they avoid and what they must not eat. FamCook then builds search and planning around the people who are actually eating.
FamCook keeps everyone’s needs separate and brings them together at the point where you’d otherwise have to sort it out between you. Children, guests or anyone else you cook for can be included without necessarily having to use FamCook themselves.
You enter this once: what they like, what they avoid, what they must not eat. From then on it counts every time that person is at the table – in the recipes you see, in the planning and in the quantities.
You can share plans and shopping lists and work on them together. Everyone sees the same thing, instead of a string of messages about who’s cooking and what’s still missing.
FamCook puts three questions together: what is this ingredient and what does it do? Who are you cooking for, and what matters to them? And what role does this ingredient play in this particular dish?
So you don’t just get whatever happened to slip through a filter. You get a suggestion that fits the people at your table and the dish itself.
“The complexity can keep growing on my side of things. For you, it should only get simpler.”
That’s one of the core design principles: FamCook should use what it knows about your situation, rather than asking you to work through ever more screens.
I know what’s going on in your FamCook, and I’ll speak up unprompted when it saves you a job. Different needs at the table shouldn’t make cooking harder work for you.
And it stays up to you: you can open my tips whenever you want them.
I give you the useful bits about ingredients, shopping and cooking: how to spot the good stuff, how to store it properly, what’s in season, or what to watch out for when you cook it.
And I show you what FamCook can do for you right where you are. No looking it up, no hunting for it – it’s already there.
Not in the shops, doesn’t agree with someone, or nobody likes it? Then I don’t just look for something similar. I look at the role that ingredient plays in this dish: what has to stay the same – and what’s free to change?
A swap can taste quite different, as long as taste wasn’t the point here. And the closest match in the world is no use to you if it doesn’t provide the binding or the texture the dish needs.
I do that weighing up for you. You get alternatives that work, with a quick note on why they work here – and you pick the one you fancy.
Whether an ingredient goes in fresh, dried, ground or soaked can change its role completely.
And two things being related doesn’t mean they behave alike. Coriander leaves and ground coriander seeds may share a name, but they don’t play the same role in a dish.
So I rule out what won’t work in the dish, even when it looks like the obvious answer. That leaves you with swaps you can actually cook with.
You find a dish that suits you and the people eating with you – and you don’t have to make the same decisions again at every step after that.
You set up your group once and note what matters to each person. After that you never type it in again.
FamCook searches and rates the recipes for you. You get a sorted shortlist, not a wall of results to work through.
A recipe turns into a real plan: the right day, the right people, the right amount. FamCook does the scaling.
The ingredients from everything you’ve planned become a single shopping list, combined rather than listed recipe by recipe. When it’s time to cook, external recipes take you back to the original source.
It’s that everything works together.
FamCook connects the people you cook for, and what they need, with the right recipes, with what it knows about food, and with your planning and shopping.
Here’s an example. Knowing you don’t like cream isn’t enough. Knowing cream is a dairy product isn’t either. It’s only when you also know what the cream is doing in this dish that you can say whether it can be left out, cut back or swapped – and for what.
Which means you don’t have to join those dots yourself. FamCook has already joined them up for you, right where you’re making the decision – searching, planning or shopping.
Here you see what you can do with FamCook, how far each area is and what is still missing. The figures are calculated from verified evidence, not maintained by hand; “verified on the test system” means it was really tried there – something only built locally does not count as done.
The direction is clear: FamCook should understand what you say, not only what you type into a form.
“Just tell me what’s changed. I take the new situation into account, redo the amounts and put an updated plan and shopping list in front of you. You decide what works – or ask me for something else.”
FamCook can’t do all of that yet. But a lot of what it takes is already being built behind the scenes: knowing what food is and what it does in a dish, taking different needs into account, and joining up the different steps of everyday cooking.
This groundwork is what will make that kind of support possible soon.
And Friedemann? My job is to make sure you hardly ever have to think about how FamCook works.