How to use Pantry Plate

A short walkthrough and answers to common questions.

Step by step

  1. Open the Home page.
  2. Type an ingredient and press Add. Repeat for everything in your fridge or pantry. Ingredients appear as removable chips.
  3. Press Find Recipes. The page shows a featured carousel of the top 5 matches plus a full grid of all results.
  4. Click any recipe card to open its detail page, where you will see the full ingredient list, cooking steps, dietary tags, and a chart of pantry coverage.
  5. Press Save to Favorites on a recipe you want to keep. It appears on the Favorites page on future visits.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account?

No. The favorites list is shared, which is intentional for this project demo. Per-user accounts are on the roadmap.

Why did "Find Recipes" return nothing?

Spoonacular sometimes returns an empty list if the ingredient names are very specific. Try broader names ("chicken" instead of "boneless skinless chicken thighs").

Why did I get a rate-limit error?

The free Spoonacular plan allows around 150 requests per day across the whole project. If you see a 402 or 429 response, wait a few minutes or generate a new free key.

The page is empty / the API returned an error.

Open the browser dev tools (F12), check the Console tab for an error message, and confirm that the deployment has SPOONACULAR_API_KEY, SUPABASE_URL, and SUPABASE_ANON_KEY set in Vercel's environment variables.

Are the ingredient names case-sensitive?

No. The backend lowercases and trims the list before sending it to Spoonacular.

Can I open the site by double-clicking index.html?

You can see the layout that way, but the API calls won't work because there is no server. To use the full app, either run npm start and open http://localhost:3000, or visit the deployed Vercel URL.