Crave - The online cookbook

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3 min read

Inspiration

I wish I could tell you there was some noble inspiration for this app. That I went online to find a free cookbook and couldn't find one, so I built one myself for everyone to use. But no. There are countless amazing online cookbooks and you only need a simple google search to access them. What inspired me to make this app was the fact that I love food - nothing more.

A friend sent me a link to the hackathon and I immediately wanted to build a food related app. I didn't care what is was as long as food was involved in some way. I initially thought of a "tinder for food" app, but I later decided that a cookbook would be cool.

Tools Used

  1. React.js Framework
  2. React-bootstrap
  3. CSS
  4. Axios
  5. Amplify

Project Implementation

The API used for the project is the Spoonacular recipe-food-nutrition API. This was my first time implementing API calls so it was a bit tricky but in hindsight it was pretty straightforward. I made use of three endpoints - fetch random recipe, search recipe and get recipe information. The APIs calls were handled with axios because that's the only way I know ๐Ÿ˜…

Features

The homepage displays random recipes for you to explore. If you see anyone you like, you can add it to your favorites by clicking the heart. Screenshot (341).png

If you want to search for a particular you can. You can also filter down the search by excluding ingredients you may not like or getting only vegan recipes. Screenshot (342).png

Deployment

Deploying to amplify was simple. The process is intuitive and instructions on the website are clear. Its also free!

Screenshot (343).png

In the future I would like to add the ability to create a user and the ability to download you favorite recipes for users that want to print it out.

Final Thoughts

This project was way more complicated than I anticipated which I guess is every project ever taken on by a developer. I had to learn about routing and context API and I'm pretty sure I've never been more frustrated while building an app. But overall, I learnt a lot and I'm happy I participated.

Thanks for reading. Have a good one.

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