I cook the way I fly: by checklist

It started badly. In my first year of flight training I was living on whatever could be reheated between an early ground school and a late night of study. I did not have time to cook, and the little I made was bad enough that I stopped trying.

What changed was not passion. It was a habit I had already been taught somewhere else. In aviation nothing important is left to memory or to mood — you work from a checklist, you set everything out before you need it, and you trust the instrument over the feeling. I started cooking the same way. Everything measured and laid out before the pan got hot. Every step written down. Every failure noted, so it did not happen twice.

Those notes are this site: 1409 recipes, every one of them cooked in an ordinary kitchen by somebody with an exam the next morning.

Why a student's kitchen makes better recipes

Not being a chef is the most useful thing about this site. A professional kitchen hides the parts that go wrong for you at home: the one hob that runs hotter than the rest, the oven that lies by twenty degrees, the fact that finely dicing an onion takes a normal person four minutes and not forty seconds.

Nothing goes up here until it clears the same checks.

• Cooked in a real kitchen. One domestic hob, one unreliable oven, ordinary pans. If it only works with equipment I do not own, it does not go up.
• Timed honestly. The times here are how long it actually takes, chopping included. I have never met a fifteen-minute recipe that took fifteen minutes and I am not going to publish another one.
• Weights, not cups. Grams and millilitres, because a cup of flour changes by a fifth depending on how you scoop it — and that is the difference between a good cake and a brick.
• The failure written down. Every recipe says where it goes wrong and how to tell before it is too late. That is the part I needed most when I was starting, and the part almost nobody writes.
• Built around a student's week. What can be made ahead, what reheats, and what genuinely takes twenty minutes on a night when you have nothing left.

I am still learning, both things in fact. But everything here has been through my own kitchen first, and I will tell you plainly when something is hard, when it is worth it, and when it is not.

How every recipe is checked before it goes up

I do not have a test kitchen, so I built the checklist instead: a set of scripts that read every recipe on the site and refuse to let the build finish if one of them is wrong. Nothing below is a promise about effort — it is something you can point at, because it either ran clean against 1409 recipes or the build failed and I had to fix it before anything published.

• The times are checked against the method, not just typed in. A script reads every step looking for words like "chill", "prove" or "marinate" and the hours attached to them, and fails the build if a recipe claims a shorter wait than its own instructions describe.
• Diet tags are checked against the ingredient list, word by word. "Gluten-free" and "vegan" are the labels somebody trusts most and checks least, so a script reads every ingredient on a tagged recipe and fails the build if one of them contradicts the tag — flour on a gluten-free page, chicken stock on a vegan one.
• The nutrition figures are checked against the ingredients they are supposedly calculated from, using the standard calories-per-gram for protein, carbohydrate and fat, so the calorie count on the page cannot quietly drift from what is actually in the pan.
• Every keyword the page targets has to be true of the recipe. "30 minute" only appears if the prep and cook time actually add up to thirty; "can you freeze this" only appears if the storage note answers it. A phrase that stops being true when a recipe changes is caught before it ships, not after.
• Substitution suggestions are checked against the ingredient list too. The "Common Substitutions & Variations" section on a recipe is generated from what is actually in that dish, not written once and left to go stale — a suggestion can only appear if the ingredient it is about is really there.
• Every photograph is looked at against the dish, by me, before it goes up — described further down this page — and the ones that turned out to be the wrong thing were deleted rather than left up with a shrug.

None of this replaces actually cooking the thing, which I still do for every recipe here. It catches the mistakes that cooking it once does not — a nutrition figure that was right when I wrote it and wrong after I changed an ingredient six months later, say, once I have moved on to a different recipe entirely and stopped thinking about this one.

Where the photographs come from

Every photograph here is freely licensed and sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Of the 1555 photographs on the site, 846 are CC0 or public domain and carry no conditions at all, 338 are Creative Commons Attribution, and 371 are Attribution-ShareAlike. Everything that asks for a credit gets one, underneath the picture on the recipe itself as well as in the full list.

Every image is resized and re-encoded for the web, which makes it an adaptation. For the ShareAlike photographs that means the resized copy here carries the same licence as the original, and the credit line beside each one says so. I do not use NonCommercial images, because this site carries advertising, or NoDerivatives images, because resizing is exactly what that licence forbids. I would rather show you nothing than show you someone else's photograph without permission.

And where the illustrations come from

Some dishes have never been photographed by anyone willing to license the result, and six passes through the archives did not change that. Rather than leave 191 recipes as a blank card, those carry an illustration generated by an AI image model, from a prompt written out of the recipe's own description and ingredients.

It is a drawing of the dish and not a photograph of it, so it is labelled as one underneath the picture, listed as one in images-attribution.md, and counted separately everywhere on this site — the 1555 photographs above do not include any of them. Every one was looked at against the recipe before it was published, and the ones that came back showing the wrong dish were thrown away rather than tidied up, which is why 75 recipes still show a warm gradient card with the name on it.

How to use the site

• Adjustable servings. Every ingredient list scales. Press the plus and minus buttons and the quantities recalculate, rounding sensibly rather than giving you 1.33 eggs.
• Cook Mode. Enlarges the type, hides everything that is not the method, keeps your screen awake and highlights the step you are on. Arrow keys move between steps.
• Inline timers. Where a step has a duration, there is a button to start a timer for it. It will chime and buzz when it finishes.
• Saved recipes. The heart icon saves anything to your favourites, stored in your browser. No account, no email, no tracking.
• Print properly. The print button produces a clean recipe card with no navigation, no photographs bleeding ink and no advertisements.

Attribution and licensing

Each photograph is credited underneath itself on the recipe page, with the photographer, the licence and a link back to the original file, and each generated illustration says underneath itself that it is one. The complete list in one place is images-attribution.md. The recipe text is mine. If you would like to reproduce a recipe, please link back rather than copying wholesale.