CAPSTONE

Ingredient Endeavors is a product of my culinary journey with food, cooking and restaurant inspirations. I did not attempt to cook for myself until I lived on campus during undergrad. The start initially did not go very well, and included a self-inflicted food poisoning incident from dijon chicken. Despite some of the failures, there have been many more victories, and I have learned so much since then!

My interest in cooking took off after graduation, starting with a subscription to the Food Network magazines and their online recipes. Over time it turned into an obsession. I seemed to run out of new recipes to try on Food Network so I began to collect an assortment of cookbooks from all backgrounds, and my meal planning adventure began. In 2015 I recorded meals every day for 73 weeks. During that time I tried nearly 300 new recipes. I also created word documents of my collection of cookbooks so I could easily meal-plan with them while away from home. Some of these recipes were quite complex and at the beginning were not all very budget friendly.

Besides learning skills such as making pasta from scratch or how to not break bearnaise sauce, the journey over those weeks had taught me a lot about budgeting and planning. I learned to pair similar ingredients together to save money and which cuisines work best together.This process and the vast collection of data, which include recordings and over 500 photos, inspired me to create this meal planning app for Capstone.

Ingredient Endeavors is a prototype for a mobile application that is meant to help make cooking and meal planning approachable by having the ability to search recipes by ingredients. This process is meant to help to save money as well as inspire new ideas for both a novice or an experienced cook. It is a culmination of everything that I have learned during this program.