Out of a Muddle

Insight

The name is inspired by my daughter's favorite Cinderella song, "I'm in the middle of a muddle," which perfectly captures how parents feel at 5pm every day planning what to cook for dinner. I don't have mental energy to experiment something new. I just want to see what's in my fridge and be told exactly what I can make from my go-to library of recipes.

JTBD

I want a go-to recipe from my library that matches what's in my fridge, so I don't have to figure out dinner.

The User

Parents who already have recipes that work and don't want to try something new at 5pm.

The Product

Tech stack:

• Next.js 16 App Router, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4
• Prisma and PostgreSQL, Neon in production
• Auth.js / NextAuth v5 with email/password and optional Google. localStorage on the device first, household sync over /api/sync
• JSON-LD recipe extraction from a URL, Tesseract.js for cookbook photos
• Deployed on Vercel at 5pmmeals.christinezhu.com

Tonight: tap what's in the fridge and it gives you the matching go-to recipes you've added to your library. No one wants to try something new at 5pm, you just want to cook one of the recipes you already know works.

Import from a URL: paste a link and it extracts the recipe in a clean format. Ingredients, steps, time. No life story and no ads. If a page won't extract, you can paste the text or take a photo of a cookbook page.

Shopping list: if you're missing something, you can add it directly to your shopping list.

Household: fridge, recipes, and the shopping list can be shared with an invite code. It works on the device first, then syncs when you sign in.