efyastar/borrowed-pantry

AI cooking agent that finds African ingredients and substitutes at stores near you, with persistent memory on CockroachDB # The Borrowed Pantry **Same soul, different store.** An agentic cooking assistant for African students living abroad. Tell it what you want to eat, and it works out what you can actually buy near you, what to substitute for the things you can't find, and whether it fits your budget — then remembers everything for next time. Built for the CockroachDB × AWS Agentic Memory Hackathon. --- ## The problem Food has a way of making a place feel like home—until you're far from it. When I moved from Ghana, I craved garden egg stew, only to discover that the ingredients I had always taken for granted simply weren't available. There were no garden eggs, no kpakpo shito, no dried smoked fish, no palm nut cream. Like many people living away from home, I learned to substitute. Italian eggplant instead of garden eggs. Habanero instead of kpakpo shito. Some substitutions worked surprisingly well. Others changed the dish completely. Nobody tells you that vegetable oil will technically cook your stew, but it strips away the rich color and flavor that make it feel like home. And this isn't unique to Ghanaian food. Whether it's Mexican chiles, Korean perilla leaves, Japanese shiso, or Indian curry leaves, people everywhere face the same question: "What can I use instead?" The answers exist—but they're scattered across family phone calls, WhatsApp group chats, Reddit threads, and years of trial and error. That knowledge is difficult to search, easy to lose, and impossible for AI to reason about. Borrowed Pantry transforms that collective knowledge into structured, searchable data that both people and AI agents can use—helping anyone find substitutions that preserve the flavor, texture, and identity of a dish, no matter where they are. --- ## What it does The app walks you through one guided flow: 1. **What are you planning to eat?** — Name any African dish. If it isn't in the database yet, the agent generates the full recipe, ingredient list, substitution knowledge, and …