Give your agent a recipe database

Ask an AI assistant to plan your dinners and it'll happily do it. It'll even write a shopping list. But the recipes come from memory, the amounts are guesses, and the list was added up by a language model. Fine for ideas. Not great when you're standing in the shop.

So we turned Tiny Plates into an MCP server. Connect it and your agent works from real recipes with real amounts. The API does the maths.

Setting it up takes a minute. In Claude Code, run:

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user tinyplates https://api.tinyplates.dev/mcp

Then open /mcp, pick tinyplates and sign in with your Tiny Plates account. No key to copy around. Codex is one line too:

codex mcp add tinyplates --url https://api.tinyplates.dev/mcp

Cursor and VS Code have one-click installs in the MCP docs. On claude.ai, add it as a custom connector and paste the URL. Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Zed and opencode are in the docs too. Running in CI where nobody can sign in? Pass your API key as a header instead.

What your agent can do

Your agent gets nine tools. It can search recipes by meaning, so "creamy pasta" finds carbonara. It can filter by cuisine, diet, time and allergens. It can fetch a recipe scaled to any number of people, in metric or imperial. It can cook from what's in your fridge, suggest swaps when you're out of something, and build one shopping list from a whole week of recipes.

Each tool is just our REST API underneath. So you get the same answers, the same errors and the same limits as in your own code. Every call shows up on your usage page too.

Here's a fun one to try:

Plan four dinners for this week. Two of us, no milk or peanuts, nothing over 40 minutes. Then give me one shopping list.

The agent searches with without=milk,peanuts, checks the times, scales each recipe to two and asks the API for the shopping list. The amounts on that list are real, not estimated.

A few more ideas: "I have chicken, rice and a lime. What can I make?" Or "halve this recipe and switch it to metric". Or "I'm out of buttermilk, what can I use in these pancakes?"

If you're building your own AI app on Vercel, there's a shortcut. Vercel Connect handles sign-in for you:

vercel connect create https://api.tinyplates.dev/mcp

Each of your users signs in with their own Tiny Plates account, and Vercel keeps their tokens fresh. We made a small fix on our side so those tokens refresh properly. Your users won't get asked to sign in again every hour.

Oh, and we're now in the official MCP Registry as io.github.Artmann/tiny-plates. Apps that read the registry can find us without anyone pasting a URL.

We'd love to see what you build. A cooking assistant inside a chat app. A meal planner that knows everyone's allergies. A prep tool for a small restaurant. Calls count against the same free allowance as the API, so you can start today.