Dorm Dinners

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Inspiration

As college students, we constantly stare into near-empty pantries wondering what to cook. We wanted to solve this by creating an AI app that turns random ingredients into actual meals.

What it does

Dorm Dinners takes your pantry ingredients and uses Gemini AI to generate 5 custom recipes with measurements, instructions, and student-friendly tips—using only what you have plus basic staples.

How we built it

We built it with React and Vite for the frontend. Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash API generates recipes from user ingredients. We designed a simple mobile-first UI with CSS and organized code into reusable components.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out which AP would work best for our project. Getting Gemini to return consistent JSON format and properly matching ingredient variations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to integrate APIs into a project and using React with CSS for UI development. We're also super proud of ourselves for completing our first hackathon and learning so much!

What we learned

We learned API integration, React fundamentals, and CSS styling from scratch. Prompt engineering with Gemini AI taught us how to get consistent outputs from generative models. We also gained experience with environment variables, async JavaScript, JSON parsing, and debugging external APIs. Most importantly, we proved to ourselves that we can build a functional product in 24 hours.