I personally enjoy cooking. It’s fun, relaxing, and, if you don’t completely mess it up, comes with a tasty reward at the end. However, the process of coming up with what I want to eat in a week, planning out recipes, and shopping for the ingredients is a complete nightmare!
It’s a part of my week that I dread, and I put it off to the last minute every time. So, I decided to try outsourcing this problem to ChatGPT. I’ve tried doing this in the past and, while it worked, ChatGPT was a bit lazy with the whole process.
The prompt
I asked ChatGPT:
“Plan out a Monday to Friday food plan for someone in the U.K. I shop at Sainsbury's and need food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I want a variation of meals, while trying to keep costs low, and a diet that is healthy and not too high in calories, while still being filling. All meals should be for two people.”
This, in theory, should be a fairly easy prompt for ChatGPT. I threw in a few additional factors for it to consider, most notably the inclusion of my region of the world and the supermarket I’m using, as well as some restrictions for the type of recipes on offer.
ChatGPT spent approximately four seconds pondering this, compared to my usual hours of internet recipe scrolling and attempts to remember what foods I actually like.
It responded with a full week of ideas, split into ingredients and instructions. While it did include some variation, with no meals repeating at any point, a lot of what was offered was incredibly bland.
One recipe that was offered up was a ‘Turkey bowl’ which appeared to just be ground turkey, kidney beans and an avocado, all mixed in a bowl. No thanks.
Upgrading the menu
I followed this first attempt up by asking for recipes that were ‘more interesting’ and explained that ‘I didn’t mind longer and more complicated recipes’. ChatGPT took this all on board, rewriting the recipes and informing me that “These dinners are more plate-style instead of one thing in a bowl.” How very reassuring.
This new plan included a varied week of foods, including loaded baked sweet potatoes, a stir fry, and smoked chili turkey bowls (it really can’t let that one go). It also decided that it liked the idea of me having fajitas that week… on three different occasions.
There was nothing wrong with what had been prepared, but it was slightly too focused on two of my original requirements: calories and costs. Out of curiosity, I asked it to forget about those factors for now and focus on creating an exciting and mixed week of food, within a reasonable budget and keeping health in mind.
Here, it nailed the brief. A week of meals that hit the trifecta of being affordable, healthy and also interesting. It also included recipes for each of them. While some of the recipes felt a bit… vague, the idea was there; they just needed refining.
I asked ChatGPT to keep this list of meals, and produce me clear step by step instructions for each, as well as a shopping list ordered by categories.
This pushed the AI model into giving me clearer recipes with understandable steps and, more importantly, all of the ingredients I needed to go buy in one place. It even made clear which ingredients are optional extras to save me money.
Does it work well?
This whole process took me about 10-15 minutes with the re-prompting and specifying what I was after. Compared to what I’ve done in the past, scrolling through different recipes, planning and writing a list, and trying to make sure it is all healthy, it was so much quicker.
The shopping list was done for me, and even put into a clear order. While I probably won’t do this every week, it is an incredible solution to those weeks where planning is the last thing you want to do.
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