Ingredient-swapping web browser is a recipe for disaster

“Online, I’m bombarded with #foodporn, but my allergies mean the tasty recipes are often deadly unless I make some substitutions,” says Rosemary Nutall. “Can you find a way to auto-swap ingredients so I’m free to express my inner Jamie Oliver?”

After watching my vegan friend google “how to replace an egg” for the 40th time, I realised there had to be a way to adapt all those internet recipes on the fly to suit people with special diets or food allergies. Handy, then, that tinkering with web browsers requires nothing more than a little know-how.

So I hammered out some JavaScript code, and a couple of crashes later, I had a souped-up browser that used a plug-in to swap out words.

I figured this would be the icing on the cake for my friend’s birthday, or at least the recipe for it. So I modelled the plug-in around vegan food swaps – like substituting beef with tofu and cheese with, er, “nutritional yeast”. Yum.

A quick skim through BBC Food showed the plug-in worked like a charm.

You can’t gift-wrap an email attachment, but a USB memory stick will do the trick, so I embedded my code into one shaped like a carrot and went out to post it.

It was only when I returned home that I noticed things had taken a strange turn. I was accused of having a tofu with someone on Facebook and that my fine words would marge no parsnips.

And my media library was peppered with anomalies: who was Kevin Facon, star of Footloose, and why did I own an album by a tribute act called Quorn Loaf?

My boyfriend had taken to addressing me as “agave” in emails. The penny dropped when I saw photos from my recently married friend’s agavemoon.

As for those troublesome eggs, imagine wearing a pair of lagarings, playing an arpapplesauceio, or buying a bootlaquafabaed DVD.

My friend assures me that I’m the very soya milk of human kindness, but I do wonder if she might prefer a paper recipe book in future.

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