Kitchen Kiosk

Why would anyone ever want a computer in their kitchen? As computers have started to expand out of the home-office and into our living rooms, I start to wonder... is the kitchen next?

Ever look up a recipe on-line? Have you given on-line grocery shopping a try yet? Ever looked at your calendar to see when you could maybe cook that great recipe your friend made for you a few months ago? What about shopping lists? Wing-it, pencil and paper? or write/print out a few needed things on the computer?

Of course there is also a quick check of the news, weather, email or web search as well...

But what I'm getting at here, is a suite of kitchen applications designed for a kitchen kiosk.. a web browser app used within your kitchen...

#1) Recipebook (Add recipes, Find new ones, Share ones with friends/family)
#2) Grocery List creator
#3) Meal scheduler
#4) Food DB

The recipebook is the primary application of the kitchen... but as you can probably see, it's value can be extended if it can work with other external applications... For example, I want to cook sara's vegatable lasagna on Wednesday, my grandmas meatsauce on Thursday, and work on some fresh pizza dough for Pizza on Friday... if my kitchen application somehow knows all the food in my home (from shopping receipts/stores database info) and that I'd like to cook these meals this week, a grocery list can be generated of the things I don't have already...

Access the grocery list from my phone? See something on sale in the market and want to change your plans for Tuesdays meal? Don't want to go to the market but want to lookup which recipes you can make with things at home? Want to share a recipe with a friend? Want to convert your grocery list into an order to your supermarket? As you can see, applications within the realm of food are almost endless -- is one of the XML standards (RecipeML vs RecipebookXML?) being developed robust enough to support these kind of applications? This project (phpRecipeBook) looks like the start of what I'm talking about...