Introduction

Thanks for making it to this page! You will be provided with a brief tour through alastair here to make you understand the workings and concepts behind that app

Alastair is divided into 3 big components

• Chef view - Sharing and creating recipes, a global ingredient list
• Organizers view - Managing your meals, shopping-lists
• Shop view - Shops and item-mappings

Chef view

The chef view is the entry point for those AEGEEans who are really into cooking. Here you can create and share your favorite recipes and keep track of your collection. Your published recipes will be visible to everyone in the network and you can get feedback from them through reviews, while the unpublished ones are still open for edits. Other people can use your recipes for their events as soon as they are published, which is why you can not edit them yourself anymore. However, alastair admins can still edit them. Alastair admins are a group of the most enthusiastic chefs in AEGEE which volunteered to maintain the database of Alastair. They have full control over the system, being able to always edit everything, and you can always see who is among those admins. If you have any issue with the system, you can also approach them. Furthermore they are the only people allowed to edit the database of ingredients. It is important that the ingredient database is without duplicates and well maintained, as this is the foundation of everything. You need ingredients in recipes, shopping-items will be mapped to them and also on your shopping list you will find them. If an ingredient is missing, contact one of the alastair-admins to add it for you.

Organizers view

This is the place for event organizers who need support with their food planning. Using the database of recipes and shops in the system, you can plan your event cooking here and automatically generate shopping lists. Currently the list of events is not yet fetched from oms-events, so you see a bit of an unstable view there, but as soon as oms-events is stable the listing of events will be moved to oms-events. Per event you can create meals. A meal is something like "dinner" and has a date and optionally time and inside a meal you can accommodate recipes. Is is common to have diverse needs of the participants during an event, so usually just cooking one recipe is not enough to please the vegetarians and vegans and might kill your anything-intolerant and allergic participants. Thus alastair gives you the option to cook several recipes for a single meal, each associated with a person count. Per meal you can then see the recipe with the updated ingredient amounts, so you can print that page and hang it in the kitchen during cooking. All the ingredients will be summed up and shown in the shopping list. The shopping list gives you some extra options opposite to a normal textual version. You can tick items, for example if you bought them, so other organizers who go shopping later know that you already bought that item. Also it is possible that several shopping items in a shop map to the same ingredient - in that case you are able to choose which of the shopping items you want to see displayed in your shopping list, by default it is the cheapest. Also alastair knows that you can't buy 42g of onion in some supermarkets, the smallest amount is the net with 2.5kg. This is called "inflexible amount" in alastair and the system will automatically show you the smallest buying amount that covers the needed quantity of that ingredient. In case some things are not available in the store, you will be notified. In that case you should estimate the price of those ingredients yourself from wherever you intent to buy them.

Shop View

 The above luxury has a price. You will have to bribe someone in your local to go to the store with his phone and hack in all the shopping items and prices they have. Unfortunately it was not possible for the developers to gather this data from online stores, as there is no such database. However, regard it as a once-a-lifetime effort as prices don't change that fast, and even old prices might still give you a sense of how expensive your cooking might be. If you really need an accurate price estimation however, you will have to do it before every event. Also, if you are lazy, you can check if a local around you did the effort already and just use their prices, if you can deal with some inaccuracies, as all shops are publicly available. The ones allowed to edit the shop data are shop-admins which you can choose yourself. In case all shop-admins of a shop got killed in battle over the time and thus can't add you to the list, you can contact an alastair-admin to give you access. This prevents anyone in the system tinkering with your hard work of mapping the shopping items. Each shopping-item maps to an ingredient, and whenever an organizer uses that store, it will be shown as a possible ingredient. The more complete this database is, the better, as unmapped ingredients will make price-calculations inaccurate. The mapping mode helps you effectively mapping those ingredients.