These are from really good suggestions. You brought up some points that we didn't consider. In the future, we planned to post recipes along with blog posts and tips.
The difficulty level is also a great idea. I think giving them a choice of meals/difficulties is good, we also want to add the option like "surprise me" for people to discover new things. What do you think about that?
Presumably the "surprise me" would mean a random selection of the offerings rather than something not on the visible list? Americans are very fussy with their food so not knowing what it is until it arrives at your door may be going too far. But from a UX perspective I think that is shirking your responsibility to make the meals interesting.
You can certainly gamify things, and also take inspiration from the humour of Woot. For example bingo cards where you try to have meals covering the whole alphabet, or colours. Or "World Tours" where there are sequences of recipes that trace a path geographically around the world. Or voting certain ingredients off the "island". Or pick a film/TV show and make what the characters eat (or inspired by what they eat, or their locations). The Once Upon A Time In Mexico DVD has a 10 minute short on it showing how to make puerco pebil that I've done several times.
We are trying to make a service where ingredients and recipes are delivered straight to your door. So that you can start cooking without the hassle of picking up every item.
I was using spotify this summer at my internship but I have recently switch to just turntable. I have been able to find much more music there then from any other place so far.
Byran why don't you sell the book to your own students? I know a lot of my professors sell their own books through the book store (with no real publisher) they just print it out and put a cover on it.
