Spare Spoons Kitchen
No stories. Just the recipe.
Most recipe sites make you scroll past a childhood memory, an essay on why the dish matters, and a wall of ads before you reach the ingredients. This one doesn’t — the recipe comes first, always.
That’s deliberate. The point is to lower the activation cost of cooking: exact weights, plain doneness cues, and honest shortcuts, so a recipe is something you can act on, not wade through. It’s built to work with your executive function, not against it.
Anything extra — a cook’s note, a substitution, a bit of history — is short, optional, and sits below the recipe, never in front of it.
About the spoons. Most of what’s here is low-spoon by design — quick, dependable food for the days you’re running on empty. But a few rooms, like The Showroom, hold showstoppers meant for when you’ve got spoons to spare. Every recipe carries a spoon-cost meter (full spoons = the energy it costs; faded spoons = energy to spare), a Time dial, and a tier word (Anytime · Some Doing · A Project · The Big Climb) so you can see at a glance how much a dish asks, and match the cooking to the day.
What every recipe gives you
- Exact weights. Grams first, US measures one tap away — no “a splash,” no guessing.
- Plain doneness cues. “Pull it at 160°F,” “deep golden and bubbling” — how to tell it’s done, not just how long to wait.
- Spoon cost and a Time dial. The spoons show the energy a recipe costs — faded spoons are energy to spare. The Time dial shows how long it takes. Together: what a recipe asks of you, before you commit.
- Live scaling and built-in timers. Change the servings and the amounts follow; tap a step to start its countdown.
- The ingredients for each step, with the step. No scrolling back up to remind yourself what a step calls for — each one lists exactly what it needs, at the amounts you’ve scaled to, with a checkbox to tick as you go. Cook Mode takes that full screen: one step at a time, big type, its timer built in, and your screen stays awake while your hands are busy.
- “Easier, if you like.” Honest shortcuts — frozen fruit, store-bought crust — named with brands, no shame.
- A “Simplify” button. On the recipes that ask the most, one tap swaps in an easier version — fewer ingredients, shortcut steps, the same dish. More below.
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Do your mise-en-place
Mise-en-place (MEEZ ahn PLAHSS) is French for “everything in its place.” It’s the habit of doing all your prep before you start cooking — everything measured, chopped, zested, and set out within reach — so that once the heat is on, you’re only cooking. Restaurants live by it. It’s the least glamorous idea in the kitchen and probably the most useful.
I do the full works more often than not, and it’s never a bad idea. But here’s the thing: a full mise-en-place is its own project, and not all of it is load-bearing. Plenty of prep can happen while something simmers. Some of it absolutely cannot — and that’s the part that will burn you. Here’s the one from my own kitchen that still catches me off guard: I’m partway into a recipe and I know the ingredients — I read the list, I bought the lemon. Then a step calls for zest. There’s no zest. There’s a lemon in the fridge, and a pan that isn’t going to wait while I find the microplane.
What got me wasn’t the ingredient — it was its state. And the usual recipe format hides that. The prep is technically right there in the ingredient list (1 lemon, zested), but that’s the block you read once and scrolled past, and by the time it matters you’re eleven steps down with a pan going. The information was present and useless. That’s not your memory failing; it’s the format putting the cue in the one place you’d never be looking when it counted.
Everything here is built so you only have to think about the step in front of you — and that only works if the step is really one thing. “Add the lemon zest” is one thing if there’s zest in a bowl and four things if there’s a lemon in the fridge. So when a step won’t wait, the recipe says so up front: a Before you start block above the method, listing only what has to be ready before the heat goes on, and why.
It’s deliberately short. If it flagged every clove of garlic it would turn into wallpaper and you’d stop seeing it, so it only shows up where the prep takes longer than the step gives you — which is also what lets you trust that the steps without one really can wait. Get those few things done, and you can stop planning ahead entirely: just cook the step in front of you. Do the full works on top of that whenever you feel like it; it’s never wasted. But the block is the floor — the part that isn’t optional. That’s the deal.
The “Simplify” button
Here's one I built from my own experience. A lot of recipes are written for a cook with spoons to spare — a long ingredient list, a few components, choices to make. When I'm overwhelmed, I can't hold all of that at once, and a box of “Easier, if you like” shortcuts doesn't always help: now I'm reading the full recipe and mentally editing it into an easier one at the same time. That's more work, not less.
So on the recipes that ask the most, there's a 🥄 Simplify this recipe button near the top. Tap it and the page rewrites itself into the already-easier version — fewer ingredients, shortcut steps, the same dish — with nothing left for you to interpret. Tap again to go back to the full recipe. Your servings, units, and timers keep working either way. It isn't a second recipe hidden somewhere; it's the same page, gently turned down.
Not every recipe has one yet — they're being added where they help most. If there's one you'd like to see simplified, that's exactly the kind of thing worth asking for.
A note on the art
The illustrations here are made with AI. As a one-person, ad-free project, it's what lets every recipe have its own calm, consistent picture — without a slow wall of photos or a paywall to cover it.