Recipe Collections
How many recipes does anyone actually need?
A bigger recipe collection is usually treated as the goal. Past a certain point, it starts working against you.
There's an implicit assumption running through a lot of food content that more recipes is always the goal — more ideas, more variety, a bigger collection to draw from. It's rarely questioned directly, but it's worth asking plainly: is a bigger recipe collection actually better, past a certain point, or does the constant pursuit of more just become its own quiet source of overwhelm?
What a working rotation actually looks like
Most households, in practice, cook from a fairly small, repeating set of meals, even households that would describe themselves as liking variety, and that set covers the bulk of what gets made across a typical month. That's not a failure of imagination. It's roughly how much genuine variety most people want on a regular basis before novelty starts costing more in decision effort than it delivers in enjoyment.
Against that backdrop, a saved collection running into the hundreds — accumulated over years of screenshots and saves — isn't really expanding what gets cooked. Most of it sits unused, which isn't necessarily wasted exactly, but it's worth being honest that the size of a collection and the quality of what actually gets eaten aren't the same thing, and chasing the first doesn't reliably improve the second.
Why more can start working against you
Past a certain size, a large collection becomes harder to actually use, not easier — more to scroll through, more decision fatigue in choosing among options, more chance that the thing you're looking for is buried under hundreds of similar entries. A collection's usefulness doesn't scale indefinitely with its size; at some point, growth in volume starts trading against ease of actually finding and using what's there.
What's worth aiming for instead
- A reliable core rotation — the meals that really get made and enjoyed — kept easy to find and easy to plan from
- A smaller, separate pool of "want to try" recipes, worked through gradually rather than left to pile up indefinitely
- Permission to let go of recipes saved once, in a moment of enthusiasm, that have no realistic path to actually being made
Where mmmiso fits
A collection doesn't need to be enormous to be useful. In mmmiso you can favourite the meals you actually cook and filter the library down to just those, and sorting by least recently made puts the recipes you've saved but never cooked at the top, so the "want to try" pile has somewhere to be looked at rather than buried. One honest limit: there's no separate to-try list, so the two groups live in the same library and you tell them apart by favourite and by what you've made. A recipe box earns its place by helping you eat well, and a smaller, well-used set does that better than a sprawling, half-forgotten one.