taste your mood

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umami dishes (example)

Inspiration

Our friend group is always unsure of what to eat whenever we hang out, so we decided to create a website that would both recommend us dishes and introduce us to new cuisines we have never tried before.

What it does

Based on the type of food you are craving—sweet, savory, etc.—the website will output you a list of fetched dishes/foods/ingredients: anything to inspire you on what to cook or eat out at.

How we built it

We used the API Edamam to return dishes based on the keyword selected. For the back end, we used Express and Node.js. For the front end, we used HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Finding the right API was very difficult because a lot of APIs have limited usage or are blocked behind paywalls. With Edamam, although we had a generous limit, the fetched results were often wonky—returning duplicate names, or names that weren't associated with the keyword; they simply had the actual word in the title, which felt redundant. Initially, we had wanted to output randomized dishes and blurbs about their recipes and nutritional values, but we ran out of time before we could implement these features. We also could not host the website on Google Cloud in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of ourselves for creating our first website, and using JavaScript Express, HTML/CSS, and Node.js for the first time. There was a bit of a learning curve, but in the end we managed to create a functioning project.

What we learned

We learned that while it's okay to be ambitious, we should also be reasonable too, and split projects into manageable steps. A lot of the time we tried to accomplish big goals right away, which actually ended up being detrimental for us.