What's for dinner Maa!!!
Helping a working person create magic with ingredients in the pantry and serve food.
Published Mar 11, 2024
Background
Since time immemorial, Food, clothing and shelter are the three basic tenets of a happy life.
I come from a family where food is the Core tenet of our lives. We love to eat, drink and make merry and our primary focus in life has been about creating finger-licking food (no offence to KFC) and sharing it with friends and family.
When i got my first job, i was homesick for my mother's cooking and was tired of spending my entire salary eating out on a daily basis. I took up cooking but with no idea of ingredients and recipes, i used to call my mother daily and ask for her recipes. With trial and error, i mastered a few recipes which i extensively use even today in day to day food preparation.
What did I create?
I realized that all young men and women go through the same phase when they are away from home and eating out on a daily basis is un-sustainable.
So I decided to create an application which produces recipes post taking inputs from the user with what is available in their kitchen. Also since people today are health conscious, I decided to add the calorie values for each dish whose recipe was being shared. Additionally in Indian culture, we have a concept of multiple items on the same plate (Hindi word 'Thali') so i also decided to add additional accompaniments to the main dish. For E.g. Indian Breads with Curry or Ghee Rice with Lentils or Chicken/Mutton Biryani with Salad/Cucumber Yogurt.
Finally i also decided to add a chatbot widget to the application so users could ask any further questions if needed. I was inspired from many English movies and novels and took the name "Jeeves" from PG Wodehouse novels.
Architecture of the Application
I used 4 widgets in my application.
- First Widget (Raw Ingredients in Kitchen) would ask the user about what raw ingredients are available in his/her kitchen.
- The second widget (Few Recipes using Ingredients) would use the Gen AI Model to generate a few recipes based on the ingredient list supplied by the user in first widget and would also provide calorific value and usual accompaniments to the main dish as per the below prompt.
Give detailed recipes which can be created using input from [Raw Ingredients in Kitchen] . Also provide calorific value of the recipe. What are the common accompaniments for each recipe?- The third widget (How will my food look?) would generate an image of how the meal would look based on the first recipe generated by the AI Model. My prompt for this widget is below.
Show some food images based on [Few Recipes using Ingredients]- The fourth widget (Confused with recipes, Ask Me Please) is a chatbot integrated in the application which could be used by the user to ask further questions if needed.
Future Tweaks for Go-Live to Masses
When i first created this application it was to understand GenAI and get comfortable with LLMs and prompt engineering. I was on the fence about exploring GenAI but this experience with Low-Code and the excellent UI and documentation has helped me overcome my fears.
In my future iterations I want to
- Add an integration with Amazon Q so I can add my own data sources. Currently the LLM is giving me generic recipes. With data source integration, i can focus the outputs to be specific to traditional family recipes. or anything which the user wants to search and get quick outputs on. The people who want to cook are not aware of the recipes. So they focus on ordering. If own recipes are stored on S3 or other data sources then the recipes would not be lost and this application could help the entire family to create and enjoy home cooked recipes.
- Create a community of users and allow users to upload and share their own recipes generated by the AI Model. This could be internal or on social media.
Path Ahead
I am looking out for the next use-case to solve another problem with GenAI.
My Application Link: What's for Dinner
My Youtube Link : GenAI Food Recipes
GenAI Hackathon Link : Hackathon Link