My Friend loves baking sweets but wants to eat healthy

Nikitha Kishore Avadootha — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:30:00 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

My friend Akshitha loves baking sweets. She's also managing PCOS, which means every meal comes with a mental checklist: Is this okay for me? What's actually in it? Is there a better version?

She counts calories, swaps meals for "lighter" versions, and looks up ingredients constantly. It's a lot of thinking for something that should feel good, like cooking.

So I built Akshitha's Kitchen: a small web app that already knows her health needs, so she doesn't have to start from zero every time she's hungry.

It does four things:

Swap It: She types any dish she ate or saw, like butter chicken with naan or bubble tea, and gets a more nourishing version: each ingredient, what to swap it for, and why, while keeping the foods she loves.
My Fridge: She adds what she already has, and it suggests 3 recipes, flags anything missing, and explains why each one works for PCOS.
Day Plan: Breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner for today, built around her kitchen.
Food Log: She writes what she ate in plain words, and it tags it by protein, fiber, veggies and added sugar, then gives one kind tip.

The one rule I gave myself: no calorie numbers anywhere.

Akshitha already spends so much energy counting. Another app showing her numbers would just be another thing judging her. I wanted this to feel like a friend in the kitchen, focused on what to add to her plate, not just what to take away.

Demo

Swapping a dish, cooking from the fridge, and planning the day:

Code

nikithakls17-sys / Akshitha-s-needs-help-cooking

Akshita's Kitchen

A friendly little web app that helps you cook nourishing food you actually love, built around your health conditions and whatever's already in your fridge.

Who it's for

Akshita (and anyone like her) who manages health conditions such as PCOS, thyroid, or insulin resistance through food. She wants healthier, more nourishing versions of foods she enjoys, not diets or restriction. The app has no calorie numbers anywhere. It focuses on balance and adding good things, and keeps a warm, encouraging tone.

What it does

Tab	What it does
Swap It (the main feature, and the first screen)	Type any dish ("butter chicken with naan", "bubble tea") to get a lighter, more nourishing version: ingredient swaps (original → swap → why) and how to make it.
My Fridge	Add what you have as chips. "What can I make?" gives 3 recipes using mostly those items, marks what you're

…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

AI: Gemma 4 (gemma-4-26b-a4b-it), Google's open-weight model, through the free Google AI Studio API
App: one HTML file with plain JavaScript. No backend, no build step, no install. Akshitha just opens it.
Storage: her profile, fridge and food log live only in her own browser (localStorage). There's no database and no account.
Built with: Claude Code as my coding assistant, on a very tight deadline

How Gemma is wired in: every request includes Akshitha's profile (PCOS, the foods she loves, the foods she avoids, and her diet style). So Gemma never gives generic "healthy eating" advice. Every answer is written for her.

I asked Gemma to reply in JSON, so the app can turn its answers into clean recipe cards and swap tables instead of walls of text. If a reply doesn't come back clean, the app shows a friendly retry instead of breaking.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

This app handles some of the most personal data there is: a diagnosis, eating habits, and what someone ate today.

Her data, her device. Because Gemma is open-weight, the model isn't locked behind one company's servers. The app has a setting to switch to a local Gemma through Ollama, so it can run fully on Akshitha's own laptop with no internet, and her health details never leave her device. With a closed model, that data would always have to go somewhere else.

Free to keep using. A student building for a friend shouldn't need a paid AI subscription for that friend to keep using it. Gemma is free on AI Studio's free tier, and free forever if it runs locally.

No lock-in. The same open model runs in the cloud or on her laptop. If a better open model comes along, I can swap it in with one setting, without rewriting the app.

What Akshitha Said

I sent it to her, and this is what she said:

I love cooking and I love what you built for me.
Ya, cooking while keeping all the restrictions in mind is tiring, I need something like this.

And then:

But AI can't cook as good as I do, so I am gonna use my cookbook and maybe sometimes ask for its opinion.

Honestly? That's exactly what I hoped for. I didn't want to replace her cooking. I wanted to take some of the worrying out of it.

What's Next

Snap a photo of the fridge and let Gemma read the ingredients
Recipe steps read aloud while she cooks
A weekly grocery list built from her day plans
Healthier swaps for her baking, since that's where her heart is

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma: Gemma 4 is the whole brain of the app. It reads Akshitha's profile and creates every recipe, ingredient swap, day plan, and food log tag.

Ideas only, not medical advice. Akshitha still checks with her doctor about her PCOS plan.

DEV Community: Nikitha Kishore Avadootha