Menu-Time App Blog Post
Every Sunday, my wife and I would sit down to plan our meals for the week—a routine that, while helpful, often turned into a time-consuming chore. We’d flip through recipes, try to balance different proteins, and manually build a grocery list. To streamline the process (and scratch my developer itch), I built Menu-Time: a simple Flask app that randomly selects recipes based on a chosen protein—like chicken, beef, or fish—then compiles a grocery list and links directly to the recipes.
Menu-Time has made a big difference in our weekly routine. It cuts down on planning time, helps us avoid last-minute dinner decisions, and keeps our grocery bills in check by focusing only on what we need. Having meals planned ahead of time brings a surprising sense of calm to the week—there’s one less decision to make each day, and that’s a win in any busy household.
This was my first time building an app from scratch, and I learned a lot—sometimes the hard way. I originally built the app in Django with a SQLite database, but ran into issues when containerizing it. I couldn’t save updates to the database while running in a container. Classic rookie mistake: I hadn’t read the documentation. I wrongly assumed the problem was in my code, rewrote the app in Flask, and still ran into the same issue. It was frustrating, especially since the app ran fine locally. When I looked into deploying it to the cloud, I explored hosted SQL databases like Postgres and MySQL—tools I use at work—but the cost didn’t make sense for a side project. I finally landed on Firestore from Google Cloud, a NoSQL solution with minimal costs, and everything clicked. Once I migrated to Firestore, the app ran great and deployed easily to Google Cloud Run.
Building this app was genuinely fun, and once it was up and running, I thought—why not expand it to my personal website? So I folded Menu-Time into my portfolio page to showcase projects and add a bit of personality. If you’re wondering why the repo contains both my website and this meal-planning app—that’s why.
Anyway, check out the engine code here—this is where the magic of Menu-Time happens. The code selects meals at random based on your selected protein type and merges all the ingredients into a single, streamlined grocery list. You can try the app for free—just sign in with your Google Account (no credentials stored). And if you do check it out, I’d love to hear what you think—feel free to email me!
Link to: Menu-Time
