Sofra

The kitchen planner we use at home. What is in the kitchen, what each person has accepted before and the week's nutrition go into one ranking, and how tonight's plate went is fed back in.

Sofra is the kitchen system we use at home. At first it looks like three separate wishes: use what is already in the kitchen, cook what people will actually eat, and keep the week's nutrition in balance. In practice they are one problem, and two of them pull against each other. The surest way to get a plate eaten is to repeat what has worked, while trying something new means stepping outside that. So all three feed a single ranking whose top entry is tonight's plate, and how that plate went is fed back in.

Three decisions follow from that. Sofra measures a rolling seven days rather than single meals, because how much someone eats at one meal is their own decision. Nutrition is tracked in bands instead of grams. Nobody knows how much each person took from a shared pot, so a figure in grams would look precise without measuring anything. Each person's record of which dishes they accepted is not meant as a report; it is used to change which recipe comes first tonight.

How it runs: one computer at home serves the app from a single SQLite file. A phone can also connect over the home Wi-Fi, which is opt-in. The national food composition table and barcode lookups are shown beside it.

Sofra runs on one computer at home. It needs no account and keeps its data at home, not in the cloud. What each ingredient contains comes from TÜRKOMP, the national food composition table. We have only just started using it, so it is not public yet.