Aai's Kitchen 🥘

A little corner of the internet where I write down my mother's recipes as I learn to cook them.

🌐 Live site → varun-patkar.github.io/Moms-Recipes

Why this exists

My mother reminded me — gently, the way she does — that cooking is a good life skill, and it was about time I picked it up. The trouble is my memory is terrible, and her recipes have always lived in her hands, not on paper. She measures in "a little of this" and "till it looks right," which is beautiful and completely useless to someone as literal as me.

So I'm learning. One dish at a time. And every time I manage to cook something of hers, I write it down here — proper ingredients first, then step by step — so I can find my way back to it whenever I want.

This is a personal keepsake more than a cookbook. If it helps someone else learn their own mother's cooking too, even better.

About the recipes

Every recipe here is hers. I kept her method exactly as she taught it. Because she's stingy with proportions and I'm weak on intuition, I filled in measurements grounded in trusted Indian recipe sources (Tarla Dalal, Dassana's Veg Recipes of India, Whisk Affair) — without changing the recipe itself. The numbers are just training wheels.

Photos get added as I go. So far I only have one of my very first proper Paneer Tikka Masala; the rest I ate too quickly to photograph.

The site

• Fully static — HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, no build step.
• Mobile-first and cozy, with a light/dark theme toggle (defaults to light).
• Adding a new recipe is easy: edit assets/js/recipes.js, drop a photo in images/, and it appears automatically.

Publishing on GitHub Pages

1. Push this folder to a GitHub repository.
2. Go to Settings → Pages.
3. Under Build and deployment, set Source to Deploy from a branch.
4. Choose the main branch and the / (root) folder, then Save.
5. Your kitchen will be live at https://<your-username>.github.io/<repo-name>/.

The included .nojekyll file tells GitHub Pages to serve the files as-is.

Structure

Moms-Recipes/
├── index.html            # the page
├── assets/
│   ├── css/style.css     # the homey theme + animations
│   └── js/
│       ├── recipes.js    # ← add new recipes here
│       └── main.js       # rendering + interactivity
├── images/               # finished-dish photos
├── .nojekyll             # serve files as-is on GitHub Pages
└── LICENSE

Adding a recipe

1. Open assets/js/recipes.js and copy an existing recipe object.
2. Fill in the name, ingredients, and steps.
3. Drop a photo into images/ and point photo at it (leave it empty to use the emoji badge instead).
4. Commit and push — GitHub Pages redeploys on its own.

License

Code is released under the MIT License. The recipes themselves belong to my mother. ♥

Made with love, one dish at a time. ♥