Preserving Grandma's Recipes & Stories: Building a 100% Private, Source-Grounded Family Cookbook with Open-Source AI
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend What I Built Every family has a treasure trove of secret recipes, culinary tips, and cherished memories. But for most of us, these aren't written down in neat cookbooks or standardized digital apps—they are hidden inside informal WhatsApp voice messages, spoken anecdotes over dinner, and cassette tapes passed down…
This project aims to preserve family recipes and stories by building a private, source-grounded cookbook using open-source artificial intelligence. Traditionally, family recipes are passed down through informal voice messages, anecdotes, and cassette tapes. However, modern technology has made it difficult to document and share these recipes in a structured format. Grandma's Kitchen is a solution designed to address these challenges.
The application allows users to input raw audio recordings or live voice notes using their browser. The audio is then transcribed locally using the Whisper open-source speech recognition model, ensuring that all data remains on the user's device. The transcribed text is then structured into recipe cards, extracting ingredients, steps, and timings without inventing missing details.
The application separates personal anecdotes from step-by-step cooking instructions, preserving family memories in a dedicated memory archive. Users can interact with the extracted information through a provenance inspector, which shows the original audio transcript and audio context for each fact. This feature helps maintain the integrity of the original family stories.
Search functionality allows family members to find specific recipes based on natural language queries, such as asking "What did Grandma make on cold rainy days?" The results are generated using local vector embeddings, providing accurate and relevant search results.
The entire codebase is open-source and available on GitHub, allowing developers to contribute to the project and improve its functionality. The project also includes a printable family cookbook feature, which exports the recipes in a clean, print-ready stylesheet, allowing users to create physical family heirloom cookbooks.
Grandma's Kitchen is built on a local, privacy-first architecture using open-source AI models. The application is designed to respect user privacy by keeping all data on the user's device and avoiding the use of third-party cloud services. This ensures that intimate family voice recordings, personal names, and vocal biometrics are never sent to remote servers.
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