Project proposal: What the #$@!% should I eat tonight?

This is a question I often ask myself when planning meals for the week or staring hungrily into my fridge. I like to cook, and save most links to things I've made – which are typically from the New York Times cooking section – but don't often return to that archive for inspiration.

This simple web tool would surface recipe links and some basic recipe details to the user at random. Ideally it would also let the user narrow down the potential options through some optional criteria, such as the cuisine, meal type and cooking time.

This project would draw from a database of my weekly meal planning history, which includes tags for some of the aforementioned criteria but would need some further structuring to serve as a database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Rl0DQtYLN6o7E_lrjBgxMV9ktOKvQlFHDO42QYw9Ozs/edit?pli=1#gid=1019750466

I'm drawing inspiration from this random poem generator, but would like to add a bit of user interaction to the project, if possible, while still maintaining an element of randomness. I believe this would require some JavaScript to collect user input through things like dropdowns and sliders. I'm also looking into using Google Sheets as a simple database for the recipe information.

As a backup plan if the JavaScript/Google Sheets approach doesn't work out, I think this could also work with HTML/CSS only, and scoped down to a random recipe generator without any filtering options.