Focara Kitchen - User Tutorial

Getting Started

Focara Kitchen is your family's recipe box: a warm, personal home for the recipes you actually cook. Bring them in from websites, photos, screenshots — even handwritten cards — then make each one your own, cook from it hands-free, and share it with the people you love.

The app is organized into five tabs along the bottom of the screen:

• Home - your kitchen at a glance: search, favorites, your recipes, and today's plan
• Discover - one search across your own box and the Focara inspiration library
• Add - the four ways to bring a recipe in
• Plan - meals on a timeline, with start times worked out for you
• Me - your profile, favorites, archive, shared recipes, and Settings

A few of the recipes above come with the app — warm, universally loved dishes so your box is never empty on day one. Archive or delete them whenever you like.

Free vs Pro

• Free: everything in this tutorial — the ads on browsing screens are what keep it free
• Pro: exactly the same features with every ad removed

Ads never appear while you cook, plan, or shop - see Focara Pro.

Adding a Recipe by Hand

Tap the Add tab and Focara offers four doors into your box. The last one, Type it in, is the classic way: you and the family recipe that lives in your head.

The editor is built from structured rows, so the recipe comes out clean every time:

• One ingredient per row — tap Add Ingredient for the next one
• Add Section Label groups ingredients the way the recipe thinks ("For the sauce")
• Steps get their own rows too; Focara numbers them for you
• Set the prep and cook times, servings, and an optional meal type, cuisine, or season

Tip: Emptied a row by accident? It disappears the moment you tap elsewhere — no ghost rows to clean up.

Importing from a Website

Found a recipe online? Choose Import from URL and paste the link.

Focara reads the recipe itself — title, ingredients, steps, times, servings — and skips the life story and the ads. You review everything on a confirm screen before it's saved, so nothing lands in your box sight unseen.

• Works with most recipe sites and food blogs
• The source website is remembered in Notes & Tips, so credit stays with the recipe
• If a site can't be read, Focara says so plainly and offers to let you type it in instead

Scanning Photos & Recipe Cards

The most magical door: Take a Photo or Choose from Photos turns a cookbook page, a screenshot, or Grandma's handwritten card into a real, editable recipe.

Step 1: Crop to the recipe

Drag the box around just the recipe — leave out app buttons, ads, and footers. The cleaner the crop, the cleaner the import.

Step 2: Let Focara read it

Focara reads the text on your device, splits it into title, ingredients, steps, and notes, repairs common misreads, routes times and servings into their fields, and quietly drops watermarks and other photo clutter.

Step 3: Review and save

Anything Focara wasn't sure about — a smudged fraction, a guessed unit — gets a soft orange dot so you can double-check it. Edit any row, then save.

Tip: A long recipe spread across several screenshots? Select up to 6 photos at once — they're stitched, in order, into one recipe.

Note: Photo scanning works in the languages your device can read. For a few scripts the device can't, Focara tells you up front — typing in and website import always work.

The Recipe Page

Tap any recipe to open its page — photo up top, the story underneath.

• Tap the heart on the photo to make it a favorite
• Recipes carry their story: *"From Mom's Kitchen 👩‍🍳"* on a shared recipe, the source site on an import — and once you've made it yours, *"Adapted from Mom"*
• Prep / Cook / Total times sit right under the title
• Share, Edit, and Plan are one tap away
• The ⋯ menu holds Print, Duplicate, Archive, and Delete
• Tap the photo to view it full screen, or add your own with Add Photo

Below the times, the ingredient list is a working surface, not just a list:

• Tap the ⊕ at the end of any row to send that ingredient to the shopping list — tap again to take it back
• Add All sends the whole recipe at once
• The recipe remembers what's already on the list, even after you close the app

Scaling Servings

Cooking for eight instead of four? Step the Servings up or down and every parseable quantity rescales in kitchen-friendly fractions — 1½ cups, not 1.5000.

• A Reset to N button appears whenever you've wandered from the original — one tap back to known ground
• A line Focara can't scale ("a splash", "2-3 cloves") is never silently wrong: it's marked not adjusted so you can eyeball it
• Prefer metric or imperial? Settings → Measurements converts what's shown — °F to °C in the steps, ounces to grams in the list — while the recipe itself stays untouched

Notes & Tips

The author's advice — the "trust me, brown the butter" material — lives in its own Notes & Tips section between the ingredients and your own notes. Collapsed until you want it, lightbulb-marked when you do.

On imported recipes, the original source link lives here too.

Versions: Make It Your Own

Focara's quiet superpower. Edit a recipe and, when you save, you choose:

• Update the Original - for typo fixes
• Save as Version 2 - for the night you halved the chile and doubled the garlic

The original is never overwritten. Every version stays in the version picker with its own label and note, and the newest version becomes "the recipe" everywhere — cards, search, Cook Mode, the meal planner.

Tip: Versions can each carry their own photo. A version without one gracefully shows the photo it inherited, until you shoot your own.

Your Cooking Journal

Every recipe keeps a journal under Your Notes. After you finish cooking, Focara gently asks how it went — rate it, jot what you'd change.

You can also add a photo of how it turned out — the finished-dish gallery builds itself.

Entries are dated and kept with the recipe, so next Thanksgiving you'll know exactly what last Thanksgiving taught you.

Cook Mode

Tap Start Cooking on any recipe page and the kitchen takes over: big text, no clutter, and the screen stays awake — no more elbowing your phone with flour on your hands.

• The Ingredients / Steps pill up top flips between gathering and cooking
• Tap a step to strike it through when it's done; tap again to un-do it
• If you scaled the servings, Cook Mode shows the scaled amounts

Tap ingredients as you gather them — the strikethrough is your mise en place checklist.

Note: Focara never shows an ad in Cook Mode, on the cooking timeline, or in the timers. The moments your hands are busy stay clean.

Easy Read

The Easy Read toggle highlights every ingredient right inside the step text and underlines the action words — so a glance mid-stir tells you *what* and *how much* without re-reading the paragraph.

Pick your highlight color (and whether Easy Read starts on) in Settings → Cook Mode.

Kitchen Timers

Focara reads the times out of your steps: "simmer for 15 minutes" becomes a Start 15 min button right inside the step.

• The running countdown lives in the step — tap to pause, tap again to resume, and a small ✕ appears only while paused so you never stop one by accident
• Timers are named for what they do — "Warm the olive oil", not "Timer 3" — in the tray and in the notification that finds you in the living room
• Completing a step quietly stops that step's timer

The timer tray

Tap any running timer (or the floating pill on Home) to open the tray — every timer across every recipe, with pause and stop controls.

+ Add timer creates a free-standing kitchen timer — minutes, seconds, and an optional label like "Pasta water".

Timers follow you

Leave the recipe, browse Discover, even close the app — timers keep running, and a compact pill above the tab bar keeps the countdown in sight.

Tip: Pick your timer chime in Settings → Timer Sound — five options, from a gentle ding to one that cuts through a noisy kitchen.

The Shopping List

One list for everything, fed from your recipes. Send ingredients over with the ⊕ on any recipe page (or Add All), and the checklist icon in the top corner of Home is always one tap from the list itself.

The list works like a good paper one, only smarter:

• Items group under the recipe they're for; things you type yourself gather under To buy
• Tap the circle to check something off — it drops into Completed
• The add field keeps the keyboard up, so "eggs, return, butter, return" flies
• Swipe left to delete; the ⋯ menu prints, copies, shares, or clears the list

By Item

Flip the toggle to By Item and the same list regroups by ingredient — "Onion" as one entry, with each recipe's amount beneath it. Groups are quietly ordered the way a grocery store is laid out, so produce clusters with produce.

Planning a Meal

The Plan tab turns "what's for dinner Sunday?" into a made decision.

Tap New Meal and everything lives on one screen:

• Name the meal and set Serve at — the moment food should hit the table
• Pick the dishes from your box right there — search or ride the A-Z rail; your picks pin to a Selected group on top
• Extra time adds a safety buffer (things never go exactly to plan)
• Remind me schedules a shopping reminder days before

You can also start from a recipe: Plan on any recipe page adds it to an upcoming meal or starts a new one.

The Cooking Timeline

Open a planned meal and Focara has done the arithmetic you usually do on a napkin: it counts backward from serve time and staggers each dish's start so everything lands together.

• Each dish shows its start time and cooking span, ending at one shared serve row
• Focara sends a "Time to start" notification when each dish is due — tap it and you're in that dish's Cook Mode
• Tap a due dish's row to start its timer; a running row shows the live countdown
• A terracotta now line sits among the rows while you're in the cooking window
• The ⋯ menu prints the whole meal — timeline, recipes, and a tick-box shopping list — as one packet

Cooking a Whole Meal

When it's time, tap Start Cooking on the timeline. You're in normal Cook Mode for the first dish — with one addition: a quick-switch button beside Done Cooking.

It opens the What's cooking board: every dish with its live state — cooking now, due, upcoming, done. Hop between dishes freely; each one keeps its own struck steps, timers, and Easy Read exactly as you left them.

Sharing with Your Circle

Focara sharing is a closed circle, not a social network. You invite the people you trust — and only they can send recipes to you.

• Create a free account (sign in from the Me tab), then add family from Settings → Connections
• Share on any recipe page sends it to someone in your circle
• What you share arrives in their Shared With Me — saving it stamps *"From Your Kitchen"* on their copy

Anyone can also receive a web link — a clean, ad-free page with the full recipe, no app or account needed.

Note: Your recipe box lives on your device — it isn't uploaded anywhere. Sharing sends a copy of that one recipe, and nothing else.

Discover & Inspiration

The Discover tab is one search across everything — your own box *and* the Focara inspiration library.

• Shelves reorganize By Meal Type or By Cuisine — "Your Dinners" one moment, "Your Italian" the next
• Tap a chip to narrow to one shelf; Everything else catches whatever's untagged, so nothing is ever unreachable
• See all opens any shelf as a full grid

Try Something New

The Try Something New from Focara shelf is a small curated library for nights when the box feels familiar. Preview one, and if it earns a spot —

Save to My Recipes makes it fully yours: edit it, version it, plan it, share it.

Me & Settings

The Me tab is your corner of the kitchen: name and photo, Favorites, Archived, Shared With Me, the Shopping List, and Settings.

A few settings worth knowing about:

• Cook Mode - Easy Read's default and highlight color
• Timer Sound - five chimes, tap to preview
• Measurements - metric or imperial display, preset from your region
• Meal Types - hide built-in types you never use, add your own ("Game Day", "Brunch")
• Reminders - the after-cooking check-in and shopping-reminder lead time
• Export My Recipes - your entire box, versions and notes included, as one file that's yours to keep

Note: Custom meal types and season tags are yours alone — they never travel with a shared recipe.

Focara Pro

Focara Kitchen is free, supported by ads that keep to the browsing screens. Pro removes every ad — nothing else changes, because nothing else was ever held back.

How to subscribe

1. Open Me → Settings and tap Upgrade to Pro
2. Choose Monthly or Yearly
3. Confirm with your app store

Managing your subscription

On iPhone and iPad, subscriptions are managed by the App Store: open the Settings app, tap your name, then Subscriptions, and choose Focara Kitchen. "Restore Purchases" on the Pro screen brings an existing subscription to a new phone.

On Android, subscriptions are managed by Google Play: open the Play Store app, tap your profile picture, then Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions, and choose Focara Kitchen.

Tips & Tricks

1. Crop tight when you scan - the less clutter in the photo, the cleaner the import
2. Scale, then shop - set the servings first, so the shopping list carries the right amounts
3. Version the experiments - "Save as Version 2" means the original survives your bright ideas
4. Name your kitchen timers - "Pasta water" beats guessing which of three chimes just went off
5. Give meals Extra time - the buffer is the difference between "dinner at 6" and dinner at 6
6. Write the journal entry - two honest sentences after cooking are gold a year later
7. Let the store order the list - By Item groups your list roughly aisle by aisle
8. Archive, don't delete - retired recipes keep their history and come back with one tap