Meal Planner App

This is the main screen that shows recipes you can make NOW. Or lets you search for new recipes.

What's this?

I did this project to solve a problem that my wife and I have, and as a way to learn React Native and React hooks. The gist of it is, you tell it what food you have currently and it tells you what recipes you can make. Or, you can add recipes to your meal plan, and it will tell you what you need to buy in order to make them.

This is the UI to input what food you currently have on hand. Tried to make it as easy to use as possible.

Some of the Nuts and Bolts

The way this works currently is I wrote scrapers for some of our favorite (vegan) recipe sites, and there is a cron job that runs periodically to pull in any new recipes. If it pulls in new recipes, it also generates an email and sends it to anyone subscribed alerting them about the new recipes.

Use the food you've got, only buy the food you need.

Machine Learning?

The other tricky bit of this is categorizing recipe ingredients from specific to more general canonical categories. For instance a recipe might call for "Grey Poupon" but if you have "dijon mustard" you can likely make the recipe (unless you are a real Grey Poupon snob in which case, hats off to you, good sir or madam). The way that this works is I've "hand categorized" about 1000 ingredients so far, and I'm working on training an algorithm to hopefully take over this job from me in the future.