Tutorial about how to add your own recipes to healnut.com

To add your own recipes to the web, you can use the food items toolbar, the basket you also use to add food items and compare them with others. The process to create the recipe consists on adding to the basket all the food items which will be the ingredients to your recipe and once we got them all, clicking on the create recipe toolbar icon a form to create the recipe will be shown. In the form we'll introduce the amount of each ingredient of the recipe plus some information to best describe the recipe like name, servings, etc. Let's see an example on how we created the recipe #3, apple & brocoli juice.

Ingredient selection

When you know the name of what you're looking for, the quickest way to reach it -to me at least- is the search engine, so we start introducing apple on the search box and pressing RETURN -or clicking the search button-, which will show us the list of database food items containing the word apple. Depending on how you juice apples -peeled or unpeeled- click on the second or third results item to view its page. The nutritional information doesn't matter know, but we need to access it to add the item to the basket, which is done clicking on the add2basket toolbar icon . Verify that the apple icon appears on the basket and let's get the brocoli...

Introducing broccoli on the search box and pressing RETURN we get the items containing the word broccoli. In this case the first item is which we're looking for, so clicking it we see the nutrient graphical report for raw broccoli. We proceed like we've done with apple and add it to the basket . Now we have both apple and broccoli on the basket so we can proceed to click on the recipe creation icon on the toolbar , to access the recipe creation form.

Recipe creation

On top of recipe creation form we have several text fields where we can introduce some information to describe the recipe. This information includes recipe name, preparation time, number of servings and a list of tags to help classifying the recipes and let other users find it. These tags can describe the recipe type -salad, dessert, etc.- they can also describe the recipe origins -if it's spanish food, frech food, arab food, etc.- and whatever information you think can help describe the recipe -if it's cheap, it's easy to prepare, etc. You can introduce as many comma separated tags as you wish.

Once this data is introduced, it's still pending the most important information, to introduce the amount of each recipe ingredient. To add this information, the form shows you the list of icons associated with each recipe ingredient and next to them it shows a text field where you can enter the amount plus a selection list that let us select from different units/bases to the number we've introduced. This way we can set some ingredients in grams while setting others in tablespoons, cups, etc. Let's see how it works completing the tutorial recipe.

For this apple and broccoli juice I use to get two regular size apples and 4/5 broccoli florets, so we introduce 2 ito the apple amount and click on the units listbox to select the second option -units/pieces-. And for the broccoli we have to set amount to 5 for example and select the segment/clove/part. This unit represents a "standard" division of the whole food: a garlic clove, a citric segment, a melon slice, etc. Once we have introduced the amount of each ingredient we can click on the Save button and the recipe will be saved on the database and the nutrient report for the recipe will be displayed. Be aware that for recipes, the amount of nutrients are not in a per 100gr. basis but in a per serving basis.

Tips & tricks

• Although there's no need to have an healnut account to add recipes to the web, it's useful to have it because once created, recipes can only be modified by its creator, so recipes created with no user associated to it can't be modified later if you have done some mistake or you want to change some amount later. As well as to having an account you must log in before creating recipes to let the web assing the recipes you create to your account.
• Another advantage of having an account is that you'll have a list of all the recipes you created in your profile page, so you don't have to look for them or add them as favorites.
• If you add by mistake a food item to the basket that is not an ingredient to the recipe you don't need to empty the basket and begin from scratch, just remember to set the amount of this ingredient to 0 or empty in the recipe creation form and it will not be added to the recipe.
• If you're creating a juice recipe, there are many fruits and vegetables that have a database item associated with the food juice so if you use this item instead of the item associated with the whole food the nutrient result will be more accurate. There's also a special unit/base for juices, and it represent the juice of a whole regular size food piece. Using this unit also helps gettong more accurate results. For example if you select one piece unit of cantaloupe type melon for a juice recipe it will result in a 700gr of cantaloupe melon added to the recipe because this is the weight of a whole pulp cantaloupe melon, but once you juice it you will not have 700gr. of juice melon but 400gr.