Good food, good mood.
1,361 recipes, organized by what you feel like today. No diets, no promises, no three-paragraph life story before the ingredient list.
The name
“Rico” is what my mother called me when I was little. Later I noticed that our Spanish neighbors say the same thing at the table — ¡qué rico está! — and I liked the coincidence: the word crosses the border and always means the same thing. That it tastes good. The name stuck, and so did the standard: if it isn't rico, it isn't worth it.
Why this exists
Because finding a good recipe takes too much work. You type “healthy dinner” and land on a page with ads popping up everywhere, three paragraphs of backstory before you reach the ingredients, and at the end nobody tells you how much protein is in it. I wanted the opposite: open it, see what goes in, see the numbers, and cook.
Hence the moods. You choose by what you feel like today, not by what's left in the fridge. There are training days when you want real protein. Days with no time, when the air fryer does all the work. Meat-free days, soup days, days when all you want is something sweet that won't wreck your week. It's all here, and it's always the same house.
The food
Real food, with ingredients you recognize and can buy at any supermarket. About three in four recipes contain nothing processed — no protein powder, no sweeteners, no thickeners. Where they do, it says so plainly: some days it makes sense, and there's no point pretending otherwise.
I'm Portuguese and it shows — there's caldo verde, there's salt cod, there's migas. But the base is Mediterranean, and you can see it in the numbers: 717 recipes use olive oil and 19 use butter. Roughly 38 to one. Vegetables, legumes, fish, fresh herbs, and good fat without fear.
And there's Italy: 50 pizzas and 50 pasta dishes, made the way they make them there, because it's the cuisine closest to my heart.
How it started
With a love of good food, and a problem that was mine before it was anyone else's. On busy days I was always looking for quick things that didn't taste the same every time. On slow days I wanted the opposite: a recipe worth taking your time over, the kind that fills the house with its smell. I kept gathering what I found and what I liked, always with the same rule — eating well shouldn't feel like a punishment.
But the recipes didn't speak the same language. Each one was written the way its author wrote it, some in grams and some with “to taste”, and almost none said what the dish actually contained. That's where the tedious work began: rewriting everything in my own words, putting grams where it said “to taste”, calculating the macros one by one instead of eyeballing them, and sorting all 1,361 by mood — so that choosing dinner stops being a search and becomes a two-second decision.
That's the work you're paying for when you buy a book: not the recipe, which is out there anyway, but the recipe weighed in grams, with the macros counted, and filed next to the others that go with it.
It doesn't stop here
This isn't a closed collection. There are new recipes on the way, new books for moods that don't exist yet, and improvements to the ones already here. Newsletter subscribers hear first: sign up here.
The English edition is being written right now. 1361 recipes already have their own page in English, and the rest follow book by book, together with the English ebooks. Until then, every recipe on this site is listed with its English title.
Talk to me
I hope you enjoy it. If you have a question, a suggestion, or if something doesn't add up in a recipe, write to [email protected] — I answer personally. And if you make one of these recipes, show me on Instagram or Facebook (@ricomood.food): the best dishes get featured on the page, with your name.