Hi, my friends call me Maza.
By day, I oversee operations for a civil and mechanical engineering firm. Steel and construction, that kind of world. Spreadsheets, contracts, deadlines, the boring stuff. Nothing about my job involves cooking or building apps. This one came from somewhere else entirely.
I grew up in India for the first twenty-five years of my life, in a house where everyone cooks and there's more or less always something on the stove. So it was never a skill I had to go out and learn. It was just there, the way a language is there.
What I didn't realize, until I moved to the United States for work, is that I had never really cooked just for myself. I'd cooked full meals alone plenty of times, but there was always someone on the other end of it, someone I was cooking for. You're three ingredients in, you're not sure, you ask "is this enough?" and someone glances over, says add a little more, and you carry on. You never even register it as help.
Then you move eight thousand miles away, and it turns out that quiet little safety net was doing a lot of work.
I could still cook. That part was fine. But some of the things I like making have fifteen or sixteen ingredients in them, and there's a very specific kind of despair that comes from standing over a hot pan trying to remember whether it was one spoon of something or two. Not the method. Never the method. Just the amounts.
So I started typing recipes into the notes app on my phone. That worked for about a week, until every recipe was one enormous grey wall of text and I was scrolling through it with one greasy thumb trying to find where I'd left off.
Then I tried actual recipe apps. Quite a few of them. It went badly enough that I decided I'd rather build my own than open another one.
So here it is: Cooking Steps. Every recipe is broken into steps, one screen at a time, with the amounts sitting right there in the step where you need them. The timers actually ring. Nothing is buried.
If you've ever lost your place halfway through a recipe with both hands covered in something, this was built for you as much as it was for me. It's free, there are no ads, and it's staying that way.
I figured this out as I went, so if something's missing or annoying, I want to know. Tell me what's not working. I'm still cooking on this one too.