Time to start a new project. I’ve gotten into cooking as a hobby over the past few years. My family has some recent dietary restrictions that require us to be much more selective of where we eat, so to help fill the gap, I started cooking and learning. However, I still have yet to find that perfect app to assist with my cooking needs.
Some of the features I’m looking for:
- Allergy friendly with a toggle
- Easily exportable
- Personalization on instructions (ie. concise or well explained)
- Advanced Search by ingredient
The allergy portion with easily exportable is the main combo. What I envision is a site with a database of recipes tht can be easily modified for major allergies/dietary restrictions. For me and my family, that effort is mostly manual right now. We find a recipe we like, have to search through the ingredients to find any possible allergens, and then manually search to find substitutions. We want to invert this and make allergies the first thought, not the last thought. We will tailor our recipes specifically to individuals with allergies. The idea is all recipes will appear, based on your preferences/allergies, we will automatically flag the problematic ingredients and offer suggestions on alternatives.
Thinking AI/LLMs can be used to help with the alernative suggestions. We will need some sort of disclaimer obviously. Human validation still needs to be made but if we can take out 90% of the work, that’s a huge win to families with allergies.
We also aim for this to be easily exportable. Meaning, if you like our recipes, feel free to import them into whichever platform you want to use. I have some research to do here. I know of at least couple standardized formats, we will want to make sure we support those. Ideally, we would adapt our internal model to one of these standards too, we shall see.
In terms of tech stack, I’m thinking:
- Laravel & PostgreSQL
- React
- Inertia.js
- Hugo static site for a blog
Nothing crazy. Going web first, we’ll have a responsive site that is mobile friendly. Laravel is made for a project like this. We don’t need NoSQL, distributed architecture, or real-time. This will be a nice break from that. Honestly, most of this will be vibe coded in Cursor. But that’s exactly what type of project I need right now.