Minimum Card View

Source
When I am trying to figure out what to cook, I don't get excited by a list of recipe names. I need that visual component. For a long time I have struggled with a good way to collect recipes in a visual way.

I wish Pinterest was good, but it just isn't. It's awful. The chief reason it doesn't work for me is that it's a bookmarking tool, not an archiving tool. The thing I want least is to discover that the link to a recipe I wanted to make has rotted away.

Obsidian, on the other hand, is great. I love it. It fits my brain better than any other notetaking tool I've used, and I've recently discovered some plugins that solve this particular problem for me.

With the caveat that there's probably a better way to do some of this, here's how I've got it working:

1. Install the Dataview plugin under Settings -> Community Plugins -> Browse (enabling plugins if you haven't already)
2. Install the Minimal theme under Settings -> Appearance -> Themes (needed for its cards CSS--if you've got another theme you like better I think you can extract the cards CSS.
3. Install the Minimal Theme Settings plugin under Settings -> Community Plugins -> Browse

Template for recipes looks like this (here's the markdown file):

When I add a new recipe, I copy and paste the image into the page to have it add the image to the vault. Then I copy the file name of the image into the properties, which makes it available to the embedded Data View in the note (which handles sizing it to a reasonable size) and to the Data View in the Recipes To Try page. And then I copy and paste the recipe itself into the Ingredients and Directions sections and clean up the formatting.

When filled out, it looks like this:

Then the Recipes To Try page at the start of this post uses a card view to show those images. Here's what the source of that view looks like:

| File | image |
| ---- | ----- |

{ .block-language-dataview}

The great thing about Obsidian is that you have total control over this. For example, you could add properties to the recipe template for ratings or prep time, then display or filter or sort on those properties.

I think this is really neat and I hope someone else gets some use out of this too!