PantryPulse
Recipe tracking app
Full-stack recipe app for discovering meals from the ingredients you already have, with diet, allergy, and calorie filters, plus nutrition on every recipe.
The spark
I first built PantryPulse in June 2024, and honestly, it looked more finished than it was. Search worked, but the nutrition panel was a placeholder, the fat number on every card was quietly reading protein, and the recipe popup still had sample text in it. It taught me that a nice UI isn't a product until every number on it is right.
The rewrite
In 2026 I rebuilt it on Vite, React, and Tailwind 4, kept the original fonts, and finished what version one skipped: real nutrition on every card and a proper recipe view. I also added Google sign-in with Firebase, so you can save recipes and your allergens, and those allergens fill in your filters automatically next time.
The look
I wanted a warmer ember and cream palette, with a dark mode included. Search is the whole product, so it gets the room: popular ingredient chips, a sticky filter sidebar on desktop, a filter drawer on mobile, and real loading, empty, and error states instead of blank screens.
The snags
Typing fast brought results back out of order, so every search now carries an ID, and stale responses get dropped. Dragging the calorie slider spammed the API until I debounced filter changes. Edamam's image links expire, so saved recipes fall back gracefully, and I scrubbed real API keys out of the example config.
The road ahead
The rebuild is live on Netlify, so feel free to give it a try! The API key still ships to the browser, which is fine for a demo but not for real traffic, so putting requests behind a small proxy is the next thing on my list.
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