Cook the World!

This Chrome extension answers the age-old question: what should I make for dinner? Just input ingredients and it will select a random country of origin, helping you to explore the world through food.

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Inspiration

I am one of many who discovered a love of cooking over quarantine, but as much as I love trying out new recipes, picking them can feel like a chore. It's easy to fall into the same old routine of pasta, grilled chicken, and fried rice. I wanted to build something that would inspire me to cook dishes from around the world and help me to cut back on waste by using the ingredients already available.

What it does

This extension accepts user input of up to five ingredients. It then randomly selects a nationality and bring the user to a google search result that combines this information

How I built it

I built this program using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, using Google Chrome documentation for reference. I also used Python to convert a CSS file into an Array for Javascript.

Challenges I ran into

Aside from about 1.5 semesters of compsci courses, my coding experience is limited. I had never used HTML, JavaScript, or CSS before, or worked on a personal project, so I faced several frustrating roadblocks working with this code–for example, I spent several hours attempting to convert my CSV file to an array through JavaScript before deciding to give in and use a Python program.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm really proud that I was able to get the button to trigger the implementation of my function. Chrome's privacy restrictions were a significant challenge to me early on, but I was able to learn how to achieve my goals without inline JavaScript.

What I learned

This project was essentially a crash course in web development. I learned a lot of basics working with all of these languages and platforms. I also honed my strategies for effectively researching concepts that I'm unfamiliar with!

What's next for Cook the World!

This program is pretty basic, but there are a lot of opportunities for improvement! I would love to let the user input as many ingredients as the user would like instead of capping it at 5. I would also be interested in using AI to optimize the nationality chosen based on the ingredients entered.

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