I Built Dadi's Recipe Vault to Save Family Recipes

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

What I Built

I built Dadi's Recipe Vault, a web app that turns family recipe memories into structured recipes.

The idea came from a simple problem: a lot of family recipes aren't actually written down. Someone knows how to make something and explains it over a phone call or sends a message with the recipe. Over time, those messages can get buried, and the recipe can be lost.

So I wanted to make something simple where you can give the app a recipe explanation or transcript, and it turns that unstructured information into a proper recipe that can be saved and used later.

The app uses AI to extract the ingredients and cooking steps and organize them into a clean recipe card.

DEMO

Try the live app here:

https://dadi-recipe-vault.onrender.com

The frontend and backend are deployed separately on Render.

Code

GitHub repository:

https://github.com/tani2112/DEV

How I Built It

The frontend is built with React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS and Vite.

The backend uses Python and FastAPI, with SQLite for storing recipes.

The main flow is:

Recipe text / transcript → Open-weight AI → Structured recipe → Saved recipe

The AI takes an unstructured recipe explanation and turns it into a structured recipe containing the recipe name, ingredients, quantities and cooking steps.

I also added instructions to avoid making up ingredients or quantities when they aren't provided.

The frontend and backend are deployed separately on Render.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For this project, AI isn't just an extra chatbot feature. It is part of the main functionality of the application.

Using an open-weight model gives the project more control over how the AI is used and how the recipe information is processed.

It also gives me more freedom to experiment with the AI side of the project without making the whole application dependent on a closed AI service.

My Agent Session

I used an AI coding agent during development to help with implementation, debugging and deployment.

The project was tested and iterated on manually to make sure the final application actually worked.

Prize Categories

I'm submitting this project for the Build for a Friend challenge.

The project is built around a simple problem: keeping family recipes from getting lost in messages and conversations.