Ingredients
My plan was (and still is) to allow you to tell the site what stuff you have on hand, and then the site could tell you what you can prepare.
I have about 133,000 recipes, each averaging 6 or so ingredients. The most common ingredient is salt, referenced in 58,856 recipes, followed by Sugar in 33,315, Butter in 23,775, Pepper in 19,558, and so on.
Each of the top 100 ingredients is used in more than 1400 recipes - but there are almost 91,598 ingredients in the database, currently, that show up in only one recipe.
This is where it turns into a language parsing problem. For example, just filtering for ones that match the text "chicken breast" includes 354 rows, with variations such as:
4 oz chicken breasts
Chicken breast halfs
Chicken breasts cooked
Chicken breasts cut into 4 pieces
Skinless Chicken Breast Pieces
And so on. Most of these can simply be reduced to "chicken breast", and that's what I'd like to do, but it's going to mean a lot of coming up with heuristic rules that know about various specific ingredients and common ways they're presented.
I ran one test query this evening that makes the whole project seem promising: If you have in your pantry the top 20 ingredients (Salt, Sugar, Water, Butter, Pepper, Onion, Flour, Eggs, Garlic, Milk, Olive oil, Lemon juice, Baking powder, Egg, Vanilla, Black Pepper, Parsley, All-Purpose Flour, Baking Soda, Vegetable oil), there are over 500 recipes you could make. 500 kinds of dough, mostly, but it's a start.