🧑‍🍳 AI Chef Helper

A smart WordPress plugin that generates complete recipes from whatever you have in your kitchen — with food photos, nutrition info, and a beautiful chef-quality UI.

✨ Features

• AI-powered recipes — just describe what you have and your time. The AI figures out the rest.
• Food photos — every recipe gets a beautiful matching photo via Unsplash
• Nutrition info — calories, protein, carbs, fat, and fiber per serving
• Recipe metadata — prep time, cook time, servings, difficulty level
• Dietary tags — automatically detects vegetarian, gluten-free, high-protein, etc.
• Chef's tip — a professional tip to elevate the dish
• Substitutions & storage — ingredient swaps + how to store leftovers
• Print-ready — one-click print with a clean layout
• Star ratings — users can rate each generated recipe
• Multi-provider AI — supports Gemini (free), OpenAI, Groq (free), and Mistral as fallbacks
• Premium UI — smooth animations, suggestion chips, live progress bar

🖼 Screenshot

The plugin renders a full recipe card with a photo header, meta bar, nutrition grid, ingredients, step-by-step instructions, and a chef's tip — all generated from a single natural-language input.

🚀 Installation

From WordPress Admin

1. Download the latest .zip from Releases
2. Go to WordPress Admin → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin
3. Upload the zip and click Activate

Manual

1. Clone or download this repository
2. Upload the ai-chef-helper/ folder to /wp-content/plugins/
3. Activate from Plugins in WordPress Admin

⚙️ Setup

1. Get at least one AI key (required)

The plugin tries providers in order: Gemini → OpenAI → Groq → Mistral. You only need one.

2. Get an Unsplash key (optional, recommended)

Free — no credit card required. 50 requests/hour.

1. Go to unsplash.com/developers
2. Click New Application
3. Copy your Access Key

Without this key, a default food photo is used.

3. Enter your keys

Go to WordPress Admin → AI Chef Helper and paste your keys.

4. Add the shortcode

Paste [ai_chef_recipe_form] into any page or post.

🔑 Environment Variables (Optional)

Instead of storing keys in the database, you can define them in wp-config.php:

define( 'GEMINI_API_KEY',      'your-key-here' );
define( 'OPENAI_API_KEY',      'your-key-here' );
define( 'GROQ_API_KEY',        'your-key-here' );
define( 'MISTRAL_API_KEY',     'your-key-here' );
define( 'UNSPLASH_ACCESS_KEY', 'your-key-here' );

Constants take priority over database values.

🧩 Shortcode

[ai_chef_recipe_form]

Works in Gutenberg (Shortcode block), Classic Editor, Elementor, WPBakery, and most page builders.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch: git checkout -b feature/my-feature
3. Commit your changes: git commit -m 'Add my feature'
4. Push to the branch: git push origin feature/my-feature
5. Open a Pull Request

Ideas for contributions

• [ ] Save favourite recipes to user profile
• [ ] Weekly meal planner shortcode
• [ ] WooCommerce ingredient links
• [ ] Recipe schema markup (SEO)
• [ ] Multi-language support
• [ ] AJAX streaming for faster response feel

📄 License

GPL-2.0 — see LICENSE for details. Free to use, modify, and distribute.

🙏 Credits

• AI providers: Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq, Mistral
• Photos: Unsplash
• Built with ❤️ for home cooks everywhere