Tool scheduling: planning around your kitchen

Mise en Party tracks the tools in your kitchen so no meal needs the blender for two steps at once. As you cook recipes with different tools, you'll be progressively prompted to enter how many of each tool you have, minimizing the upfront cost of cataloging your whole kitchen.

Which tools Mise en Party tracks

Mise en Party tracks cooking tools, like cooktop burners, pots, skillets, blenders, and the oven, to prevent overlapping steps from contesting the same one. Two recipes can share the oven when their temperatures are within 15°F of each other. I found that tracking smaller items like kitchen knives and bowls was too tedious, and it was easier to grab a pot as a bowl or clean a used bowl quickly than get the exact number of bowls correct. Mise en Party does ask for a lot of small bowls, so I recommend picking up a pack of 4-8.

How tools shape the schedule

Using the size of your kitchen, Mise en Party schedules the cooking around the resources available to you, maintaining the objective of shortest cooking time.

If a meal requires more tools than you have, Mise en Party first tries to find a schedule with a reduced tool load suitable for your kitchen. If found, this is the schedule presented to you; otherwise, you'll be handed a schedule that goes over by as little as possible, and the meal page warns of the difference.

Recording your tools

When you open a recipe that uses a tool you haven't recorded yet, a pop-up will prompt you for how many of that tool you have.

You may choose to ignore a tool, which causes the app to remove any constraint from that tool during optimization. You can change your tools later under Menu, then Account, then Kitchen.

Questions

What if I have four induction rings? Then you mark 4 for Cooktop; each ring or burner counts as one.

Does the app know my oven's preheat time? Not yet. The preheat time comes from the recipe's preheat step, but a future goal is to include modifications for fast and slow appliances.

Can I cook on a single burner? Yes, but when a meal needs two burners at once, the meal page warns you, and you'll need to juggle pans on and off the stove.