Cooktop

Cooktop is a meal planning tool developed to make everyday cooking cheaper, faster and more efficient. It generates meal plans that help users minimize food wastage while reducing both cooking and grocery shopping time. In addition to meal planning, Cooktop also integrates recipe, grocery shopping, and pantry management into a single application.

Main Features

Managing Recipes

With Cooktop you can keep your favorite recipes in your personal account. You can choose to add recipes manually or you can add recipes you found online automatically. You just have to enter the URL of the recipe.

Then, you can query for recipes based on ingredients, cooking time, tags, etc. It is also possible to delete or edit your recipes at anytime.

Managing Pantry

In the pantry section, you can keep track of what you have in stock. When adding items, you have the option to include an expiration date to it. So, expiring ingredients can be prioritized in the meal plans. The quantity of ingredients in the pantry can also be adjusted automatically based on the groceries you buy and what is used in your meals.

Generating Meal Plans

This feature was the main motivation for building this application. You select how many times you want to cook, how many servings you need, and ingredients you want to use. Then, Cooktop generates a plan based on that and your pantry. The app finds a variety of recipes while trying to reuse as many ingredients as possible especially those already in your pantry. It is also possible to replace recipes once the plan is ready if you wish. There are several reasons to planning meals this way:

• Reducing shopping time: You save time shopping because there are fewer things you have to buy. This is because you will already have many of the ingredients in the plan, and you can purchase other ingredients in larger quantities since they are being used in several recipes.
• Reducing food wastage: Cooking food with a great variety of ingredients and having a large amount of unused items increases the chances of food spoilage. This plan minimizes this.
• Saving cooking time: Reusing ingredients means there are higher chances of batch cooking. For example, the same may be chopped or marinate in the different recipes. You can do it when you cook the first meal and not have to do it again when cooking the second one on another day.
• Saving money: Besides saving money by reducing waste. You can also cut your grocery spending. You can select ingredients to be used in the plan and their quantities. So you can make better use of discounts in your grocery store.

Generating Shopping List

Once the weekly meal plan is established, Cooktop automatically generates a corresponding shopping list. Additionally, users have the flexibility to manually edit the list according to their preferences.

Technologies Used

• Backend:
  • Programming Language: Python
  • Web Framework: Django
  • REST Framework: Django Ninja
  • Linting: Flake8
• Frontend:
  • Programming Language: TypeScript
  • UI Library: React
  • Linting: ESLint
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Containerization: Docker
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions

Progress

This application is currently under development. The backend application for this first version is complete. I am now implementing the user interface. The application is expected to be released by the end of April(2024). Once it is launched, I will add the link to it here.