Kin & Kettle is a private home for a family's recipes: one place to keep them, cook from them, print them and pass them down. It runs in the browser on phones, tablets and computers, so there's nothing to install.

I built it because our own family recipes lived in a search bar. Every time Jessica and I cooked, we looked the recipe up again, scrolled past the ads, and printed it on whatever paper was handy. With kids in the house, that page never made it to the next time.

What a family gets

• Everyone's recipes in one place: ingredients, steps, kitchen notes and the story behind it

• The whole family: invite them by link or email

• Cooking mode: one big step at a time with that step's ingredients, and the screen stays awake

• Scaling: amounts convert to sensible kitchen units, even inside the steps (double it and 3 tsp. becomes 2 tbsp.)

• Meal plans: one shopping list, grouped by store section

• Printing: Letter pages, 4x6 and 3x5 recipe cards with a QR code back to the live recipe, and home cookbooks on paid plans

The hard part was printing

I thought "print a recipe" meant a print stylesheet. It turned into one of the biggest parts of the app. Browser printing came out tiny or scaled oddly depending on the printer, and it couldn't handle custom card sizes. Longer recipes have to run onto a second card without a blank side in the middle. The type has to shrink just enough to fit, not so much you can't read it.

Now Print fetches a real PDF from the server. Headless Chrome renders each card, measures it, picks the largest type size that fits on the fewest sides, and adds a blank back only at the end.

Printing is on every plan, including the free one. Most recipe apps want you to stay on your phone. I'd rather the recipe outlive the app.

Under the hood

I started on NocoDB to get going. Once there were multiple families with sign-in and privacy between them, I moved everything to Supabase and Postgres with row-level security.

The Starter plan is free to keep. It's not a trial, and there's nothing to cancel.

I'd love feedback from anyone who's built printing into a web app, or anyone whose family recipes are still on index cards.