Personal Projects / 2025-2026
Grandma's Kitchen
Designed and built a private family recipe box in memory of my grandmother, made for cooking from in real time: live sessions any device can join, hands-free voice, and AI help with finding and adding recipes.
Inside the kitchen
The opening
The home page opens on the library, with search across every recipe.
The photo wall
Every recipe on one wall you can drag and zoom, grouped by kind, year or season.
A recipe page
Each recipe leads with one big picture and one clear action: Start cooking. AI illustrations are labelled.
The stove
Large type reads from across the kitchen. The live code lets another device follow along, with shared steps and timers.
Adding a recipe
Type it in, paste it whole, scan a card or find one with AI, with a live preview alongside.
Seasonal themes: New Year's
Eleven themes follow the calendar. New Year’s brings art deco gold and a clock at midnight.
Seasonal themes: Halloween
Each theme restyles the whole site with its own art and type.
Seasonal themes: Christmas
A snowy window, candles and a lit garland for December.
Overview
Grandma's Kitchen is a private recipe box I designed and built for my family and friends, in memory of my grandmother. It holds family heritage dishes and everyday home cooking, and it's built around photographs. Recipes can be browsed, added, and cooked from on any device.
It started in 2025 as a quick prototype. In 2026 I moved it to a new backend and rebuilt the experience from the ground up, including the design, the cooking mode, and the AI features.
Challenge
Most recipe sites are built for reading at a desk, but cooking happens with messy hands, a phone propped on the counter, and several things going at once. A family recipe box also has a different job from a public site: it should feel personal, stay private, and make it easy for people who aren't technical to add recipes.
The design challenge was to keep the warmth of a handwritten recipe box while making every recipe work as a live, step-by-step guide.
Approach
I treated cooking as the core of the product and worked outward from there. Recipes became structured data, with ingredient groups, steps, timers, and temperatures, so the same recipe could power reading, scaling, voice, and shared sessions.
I then designed for the moments around the stove: the screen stays awake, instructions read from across the room, and the portion step asks how many people you're cooking for before you start. I used AI-assisted development to move between design and implementation, and checked each change in the running app.
Solution
Cooking is a live session that any device can join with a code or QR code, with steps and timers shared between them. Recipes scale by people or by batches. Hands-free mode takes voice commands, reads steps aloud, and answers questions mid-recipe. Because the microphone stays open in a busy kitchen, only speech aimed at the helper goes to AI; the rest is treated as the room talking.
Adding a recipe works however it arrives: type it in, paste it whole, scan a recipe card, or find one on the web with AI. Browsing covers chapters, occasions, cooks, search, and a WebGL photo wall that groups every recipe by kind, year, or season.
Eleven themes follow the calendar, including moving dates like Easter and Thanksgiving, and each one restyles the whole site with its own art and a character who occasionally peeks in. Everything sits behind invite-only sign-in, and the server refuses recipe data to anyone else.
Impact
The result is a working product my family can use: a library of more than 600 recipes that can be browsed, cooked from together, and added to. Moving recipes into structured data means one source now drives the page, the live session, the scaling, and the spoken instructions.
As a design project, it shows the same end-to-end ownership as my professional work, applied to something personal: product definition, interaction and visual design, AI features, access control, and production releases.
Key Learnings
Designing for hands-free use changed the product more than any visual decision. Once the screen can't be relied on, each step has to make sense when it's spoken aloud, and the system has to know when it's being spoken to.
AI also needed clear limits in a family archive. AI-drawn pictures are labelled as illustrations, the voice is identified as AI-generated, and the device's own voice takes over when it isn't available, so nobody mistakes a generated picture for a real photo of the dish.