Meet Purple Beets (formerly Eggplant), a collaborative household recipe manager with TikTok imports, voting-based meal planning, and a funky neo-brutalist design that makes cooking decisions delightfully democratic.
Welcome to Code2Cast! Today we're exploring Purple Beets, a collaborative cooking app that started as a simple recipe manager and evolved into something way more interesting.
What makes this project fascinating is how it tackles a real relationship challenge - deciding what to cook together. Will built this for his household with Jess, and it shows in every feature.
So it's Next.js with Prisma, but the magic is in the collaboration model. Users can invite household members and vote on weekly meals through 'vote sessions' - democracy in the kitchen!
And the voting isn't just yes or no. You can vote 'maybe', 'pass', or mark priority votes as 'super likes'. There's even a chat system for negotiating meal decisions with AI assistance.
The tech stack is solid - React 19, TypeScript, Radix UI - but what grabbed my attention is the design system. It's this bold neo-brutalist aesthetic with hard black borders, hot pink buttons, and uppercase typography everywhere.
They call it 'funky' in their docs, and it really is! Hard drop shadows that move when you hover, gold accents, and even text shadows. It's like 90s web design meets modern React, but it works because it matches the app's playful personality.
There's also TikTok recipe import through their oembed API, Kroger integration for grocery ordering, and my favorite detail - a boolean field called 'gettingSome' in the recipe ratings table.
Purple Beets proves that personal projects can be the most innovative. When you're solving your own problems, you think of features like household voting, AI recipe editing, and turning meal planning into a collaborative game instead of a chore.