Meal of the Day

The best food recommender

Comment

Inspiration

After completing my first year at university, I moved into an apartment with my friends for the first time. As a result, I had to cook my own food. Knowing that I could hardly crack an egg, this was a daunting task. Surprisingly, when given no choice but to cook my own food, I found it very relaxing and enjoyable. The only problem was deciding what to cook. I wanted to solve this issue by using my favourite recipe resource: Kitchen Stories.

What it does

Meal of the Day accounts for 3 factors: time to cook, ingredients available, and healthiness of the meal, to give the user the perfect meal recommendation. The website uses recipes from a reliable resource, Kitchen Stories, which delivers delicious recipes from a variety of cuisines.

How I built it

The front-end is built with ReactJS. The backend APIs are developed using NodeJS and Express. I also used the Puppeteer library to webscrape Kitchen Stories to get data on recipes (A big thank you to my favourite recipe app, Kitchen Stories).

Challenges I ran into

This was the first time I was using the Puppeteer library, hence I had to watch a lot of tutorial videos to be able to get data from a lot of webpages. This is also my first React and NodeJS full stack webapp. I completed a 40 hours React course and another 18 hour MERN course to get the skillset to complete this project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud to be able to run this website on a real server and actually complete the entire project. This was the first full stack web app I have made by myself and it was incredibly rewarding to be able to complete it from scratch.

What I learned

I learned an incredible amount by doing everything myself. I practised my React skills and learned how to make a functional backend using Express and NodeJS. I also learned how to web scrape using Puppeteer.

What's next for Meal of the Day

The next step is to deploy the backend on real servers so that the app can be made live for everyone to use. Currently, I only use this website for myself but I would love to share it with everyone too!

Share this project:

Updates