recipe-to-list

What This Skill Does

The recipe-to-list skill is a powerful automation tool designed to bridge the gap between culinary inspiration and grocery procurement. By leveraging Gemini Flash’s vision and linguistic processing capabilities, this skill transforms unstructured recipe data—whether captured from a photograph of a cookbook or scraped from a website—into actionable, organized tasks within Todoist. The skill doesn't just copy-paste ingredients; it performs intelligent reconciliation. It pulls your existing 'Shopping' project, cross-references it against new requirements using conservative synonym mapping (e.g., coriander vs. cilantro), and automatically ignores pantry staples like salt and pepper unless explicitly directed otherwise. Furthermore, it maintains your personal culinary library by automatically generating markdown files in your recipes/ directory, complete with an updated recipes/index.md file for easy navigation.

Installation

To install this skill, use the OpenClaw CLI provided by your setup: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/borahm/recipe-to-list

Ensure you have configured the following environment variables:

• GEMINI_API_KEY: Required for ingredient extraction and vision analysis.
• TODOIST_API_TOKEN: Required for authenticating with the Todoist API to read and write items.
• Additionally, ensure the todoist-ts-cli is available in your PATH.

Use Cases

1. Meal Planning: Snap a photo of a recipe in a physical cookbook to quickly generate a grocery run list without manual transcription.
2. Web Recipe Procurement: Convert online recipes into standard-format shopping lists that integrate seamlessly with your existing, ongoing grocery tracking.
3. Cookbook Maintenance: Automatically archive recipes you've cooked, building a searchable markdown-based cookbook in your workspace over time.

Example Prompts

1. "Look at this photo of my grandma's lasagna recipe and add the missing ingredients to my Todoist Shopping list."
2. "Find a recipe for Vegan Pad Thai online, add the ingredients to my Shopping list, and save the recipe to my cookbook."
3. "Process the recipe on my screen; skip the salt and pepper, and save it to the cookbook as 'Midweek Vegetable Curry'."

Tips & Limitations

• Precision: The model performs best when the image provided contains a clear list of ingredients. If extraction fails, try to crop the image to focus solely on the ingredient section.
• Consistency: The tool assumes a flat list structure in Todoist. Avoid using nested sections in your 'Shopping' project to ensure the overlap-checking logic functions correctly.
• Conservatism: The synonym matching is intentionally conservative. If the tool misses an overlap, it is safer to merge them manually in Todoist rather than risk the tool accidentally deleting items you actually need.
• Dry Runs: When testing a new recipe source, use the --dry-run flag to verify the extracted list before committing changes to your production Todoist list.