Yehudit Michaeli · Chef’s Recipe Archive

The idea

Chef Yehudit Michaeli ran a French-country restaurant in Rishpon, and kept thousands of recipes and menus in Google Drive folders over the years. This site turns that archive into a digital cookbook that anyone can search and cook from.

What I built

• A full catalogue — every recipe organised by chapter, sub-chapter, holiday and world cuisine, generated from the original file and folder names by a Python pipeline. Each entry opens the original page.
• Featured recipes, fully interactive — around 240 recipes have their own pages with quantity scaling, conversion to grams, built-in timers, a cooking mode that keeps the screen awake, a shopping list and print view.
• The menu archive — 88 menus from 2002–2009: seasonal menus, tasting evenings and holiday dinners, with private guests’ names removed.
• Hebrew-aware search that understands prefixes (ו/ה/ב/ל/מ/ש/כ), final letters and niqqud.

3D, written in code

All scenes are procedural — no downloaded models or images — built with Three.js, React Three Fiber and drei: a chef’s table with a copper cocotte and steam shader on the home page, a Hebrew recipe book that turns pages right-to-left, a dotted globe of world cuisines, a candle-lit corridor of menus, and the logo as a gold 3D emblem. Every animation stops with the system’s reduce-motion setting or from the accessibility menu.

Accessibility and privacy

Built to Israeli Standard 5568 and WCAG 2.2 AA, with a built-in accessibility menu (Alt+A), full keyboard support and text alternatives for the 3D scenes. No sign-up, no forms, self-hosted fonts and an opt-in cookie banner where “decline” is as easy as “accept”.