What’s Cooking
Recipe recommendations from the ingredients you already have.
- Generates recipes from your ingredients with Gemini 2.5 Flash
Hosted on Render’s free plan, so the demo may take up to a minute to wake up if nobody has opened it recently.
Overview
What’s Cooking is a full-stack recipe recommendation application. You enter the ingredients you have on hand, and the app returns recipe recommendations generated by Gemini 2.5 Flash.
Features
- Enter the ingredients you have available
- Backend processes each request
- Gemini 2.5 Flash generates recipe recommendations
- Recommendations are displayed in the Angular frontend
Technology
Angular
Frontend: collects ingredients and displays the recommendations.
NestJS
Backend REST API: processes requests and calls Gemini.
Gemini 2.5 Flash API
Generates the recipe recommendations.
Implementation
How a request moves through the app.
Enter ingredients
In the Angular frontend.
Call the API
The frontend sends the request to the NestJS backend.
Generate
The backend processes the request and asks Gemini 2.5 Flash for recipes.
Display
The Angular frontend renders the recommendations.
Challenges
- Free-plan cold starts
- The API runs on Render’s free plan, which sleeps when nobody is using it, so the first request can take up to a minute. The demo link warns visitors before they open it.
Lessons learned
- How to connect an app to an LLM API using an API key.
- How to write prompts that get the output I want from the model.
What it demonstrates
- REST API development with NestJS
- Integrating a third-party AI API
- Backend–frontend communication
- Component-based frontend development with Angular
Screenshots
