Chowdown Make: Handwritten Recipe to Markdown Converter

What is it?

I run a little plaintext recipe site called Chowdown, and I wanted an easy little converter that can process handwritten recipe cards (even old cursive!) into clean, formatted Markdown.

Why did you build it?

We have a lot of family recipes saved no where but paper cards, and it’s time we turn those dishes and memories into unforgettable data. I love cooking old dishes, now we’re doing that even more!

I started the build in Bolt, where I got the main functionality working. Then I deployed to Netlify hosting. Since then I’ve pulled the site locally into a git repo and now I’m editing with Cursor. What a ride!

Any plans to monetize or launch?

It’s live now, for free, and https://make.chowdown.io, go give it a try!