The pace of modern life has made a seemingly simple problem--what to cook--complex. The time and coordination required to prepare a meal makes many people turn to less healthful alternatives: eating out, frozen dinners, or junk food. Sometimes the mental energy required to assess the available ingredients, what one is "in the mood" to eat, and what recipes match the ingredients dwarf the energy used to physically prepare a meal.

The Internet provides a partial solution to this problem. Cooking websites list millions of recipes that users can filter and select based on ingredients used, taste preferences, and other criteria. But this information is divorced from the physical space where it is used. More often than not, the computer is not in the kitchen. Besides the physical separation, there is an emotional and temporal separation between the act of cooking and the act of creating or recalling a recipe on a computer.

We propose a more natural interface to the information people use in meal preparation. The kitchen countertop is the space where people prepare foods. Why couldn't it also be the space where people create and recall recipes? A countertop interface for recipe recall would allow a user to place ingredients on top of the counter and see a list of all the recipies that can be created with those items. The user could then use other physical objects from the kitchen to filter the listing of recipes. For example, by placing an egg timer on the counter, users can indicate how much time they have to create a dish. By placing a piece of cookware on the counter, the user can indicate preferred a cooking method--baked instead of fried, for example. Based on the constraints indicated by these physical tokens, the list of recipes will change to suggest an appropriate solution. Other constraints-tokens might include miniature people to indicate how many people are coming to dinner or which family members are dining, so the system can consider number of portions and known family preferences.

Storing recipes in a old-fashion recipe card is outdated in this digital age. Looking up recipes in the internet can be bundersome. Most of the time, you have search by dish rather than ingredients, time limitations or the difficulty of cooking that particlular dish. Also, it is cumbersome to always refer to a piece of paper or a computer monitor in some cases. Smart Counter makes the recipe more interactive with the activity of cooking, since all the directions are seamlessly integrated into the user's working area.

When the user chooses a recipe, the Smart Counter is able to create step by step directions on how to create the dish. The system is also able to display and save any notes that the user created when preparing the dish from previous attempts, incorporating and augmenting  memory. When recipes are created and recalled in the kitchen, they bear physical indicators of the experience, such as stains or modifications. This historical element to cooking is lost with typical computerized records.