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Recipe R&D — the inspiration inbox

Ideas arrive in four places — a screenshot, a link in the group chat, a note after service — and half are forgotten. This is the funnel that catches them.

The rule

The inbox is where ideas go to be considered, not where dishes go to be served. Nothing reaches your menu without passing through your hand.

Three ways to start

Click + Add candidate.

  • From a link — a recipe blog or a social post. Recipe pages are cleanest: the publisher already laid the recipe out, so it reads in under fifteen seconds. Social posts take longer, since it has to work from the caption and narration.
  • From a note — type the idea in prose. Be specific: “carbonara with smoked tuna belly instead of guanciale, finished with bottarga” gives the AI ten times more than “carbonara variation”.
  • From scratch — a working title and a category, no source. For ideas that started in your own kitchen.

Tag a category as you create and the playground clusters — the pasta team sees pasta, the bar sees cocktails.

What happens next

The card lands and shows Ingesting… for about thirty seconds while the AI reads the source and pulls out the ingredient list. You can walk away; it finishes on its own.

You pick the pantry item for each ingredient yourself, on the candidate’s page. The automatic pantry matching is switched off while the inventory tools are on hold.

Then, from the candidate’s page:

  • Mark reviewed — seen, not ready to act on. It leaves the Inbox tab.
  • Discard — not a fit. It stays visible in Discarded, so you can show you considered it.
  • Promote to recipe — the real work starts. You land in a draft recipe with everything pre-filled and a Ready to ship button.

Good to know

  • Five tabs across the top: Inbox, Reviewed, Promoted, Discarded, All. Combine with the category dropdown.
  • If a card couldn’t read its source, open it and click ↻ Refresh from transcript. It nearly always works second time.
  • Stuck on “Ingesting…” past three minutes? A ↻ Re-run ingest button appears.
  • Promoted ideas keep a link back to the original, so a year later you know where the dish came from.