How ChatGPT Became Our Family’s Personal Chef

How to use generative AI to plan meals and compose shopping lists

TL;DR

Whether you’re a time-crunched parent, someone who dislikes meal planning, or simply someone looking to streamline their daily routine, give ChatGPT a shot. Since we started using it for meal planning and creating shopping lists, we saved a bunch of time.

Now we go shopping less frequently, spend literally no time thinking about what to cook for the kids and we still have a healthy and quick meal on our table every day.

ChatGPT may not cook dinner for you (yet), but it can certainly take off some cognitive load and free you up to engage in things that genuinely bring you joy.

The problem

What should we cook for dinner tonight? This is a simple, yet frequently asked question in our household. We don’t have big expectations from our dinners, we’re not aficionados of the culinary arts. Quite the contrary: if I could sustain myself purely by beige, non-flavoured smoothies, I would probably go for it. However, when you have kids, this isn’t an option. Most likely. I haven’t tried it yet.

We want to provide a varied and healthy diet for our young ones. Meals that are quick to prepare, child-friendly and filling. There’s only one problem in our household: we hate planning the meals ahead and doing our shopping accordingly.

This usually results in last-minute solutions, ready meals, takeaways, and daily trips to the grocery store. Recently, we managed to change this habit without significant effort or time investment. In fact, we even reduced the time by eliminating most of the unnecessary supermarket visits. How? We outsourced the planning to ChatGPT.

The plan

ChatGPT is all the rage right now, even though its popularity is allegedly declining. OpenAI’s language model might not be as creative or original as humans are, it also lacks human emotions, and it’s not the best when it comes to numbers and mathematics.

It does certain things exceptionally well, though. Repeating and rephrasing, remixing data it was trained on. Often the results are so good, it might fool the casual observer into thinking the text was produced by a fellow human being.

Originality is, however, rarely a requirement when it comes to the weekday dinners in our home. One afternoon, hearing the usual question, I decided to ask ChatGPT: what should we have for dinner?

Me: What should we have for dinner?

ChatPGT: That depends on a variety of factors, such as your dietary preferences, the ingredients you have on hand, how much time you want to spend cooking, and more. Here are a few general suggestions:

1. **Quick & Easy**
   - **Spaghetti Aglio e Olio**: Pasta sautéed with garlic, red pepper flakes, and olive oil. Add grated Parmesan and parsley on top.

2. **Healthy**
   - **Grilled Salmon**: Seasoned with lemon, dill, salt, and pepper. Serve with quinoa and steamed asparagus or green beans.

3. **Comfort Food**
   - **Homemade Pizza**: Use pre-made dough or make your own. Top with sauce, cheese, and your favorite toppings.

4. **Vegetarian/Vegan**
   - **Chickpea Curry**: Sautéed onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, spices, and chickpeas. Serve with rice or naan bread.

5. **International Cuisine**
   - **Tacos**: Use soft or hard shells, and fill with seasoned beef, chicken, or beans. Top with lettuce, tomato, cheese, sour cream, and salsa.

Remember, these are just ideas. Cooking is all about creativity, so feel free to adapt these suggestions based on what you have and what you're in the mood for. Enjoy your dinner!

Great! Except it’s too much to choose from, I still need the recipe, and we might not have all the ingredients at home. So, I tried again and this time asked more specifically:

Me: Suggest a quick, kid friendly vegetarian meal for dinner. We have veggies, cheese, tortillas, dry pasta and canned food in our pantry. Only make one suggestion.

ChatGPT: Given the ingredients you have on hand, I'd suggest:

**Veggie Quesadillas**

**Ingredients:**
- Tortillas
- Cheese (grated, any type you prefer)
- Veggies (like bell peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, or whatever you have on hand)
- Salt, pepper, and any preferred seasoning
- A small amount of butter or oil for cooking

**Instructions:**

1. Start by chopping the veggies into small pieces. Sauté them in a pan with a little oil, salt, and pepper until they are slightly softened and have some color.
  
2. Take a tortilla, place a good amount of cheese on one half, then distribute a portion of the sautéed veggies over the cheese. Fold the tortilla in half.

3. Heat a little butter or oil in a pan over medium heat. Place the folded tortilla in the pan and cook until the bottom is golden brown. Flip and cook the other side until golden brown and the cheese inside has melted.

4. Remove from the pan and let it cool slightly, then cut into wedges.

5. Serve with a side of salsa or any canned dip you might have, or just enjoy them as is!

Kids typically love the combination of melted cheese and the familiar taste of tortillas. The veggies inside add nutrition and flavor.

Alright! Now we’re talking. Dinner is fixed. I started to wonder if I could take it further and ask for a meal plan for the week.

As I experimented with it, I realised it is pretty painful to always provide the instructions such as dietary requirements or allergies or foods we don’t like. So, I added them into the recently added “Custom instructions” section within ChatGPT.

Surprisingly, it worked very well. I told ChatGPT that I didn’t like raw tomatoes. Now in every meal and recipe that involves tomato paste, sauce, or anything related to tomatoes, it emphasises not to use raw tomatoes. It comes across a little braggy, knowing it all about my dislikes and taste, but I’ll let this one slide.

By default, ChatGPT suggests 3 meals per day. If you don’t work from home, or always have cereals for breakfast, you can ask it to skip those meals. Furthermore, you can ask to include quick instructions on how to make each meal, or alternatively, it can generate a complete recipe with ingredients and step-by-step instructions.

Shopping

We have the meal plan and the recipes. It’s time to go shopping, but wait: it takes a lot of time to go through all those recipes to compose a shopping list. I know some people enjoy creating shopping lists, but I don’t, so back to the drawing table, or in this case ChatGPT.

In the past, GPT had issues remembering previous prompts or even its own responses within a conversation. Nowadays, this issue is mostly eliminated, allowing us to ask for clarification or more information about a previous response without having to re-enter the original context. This opens up the possibility for us to get a shopping list based on the meal plan. Pretty neat! GPT can generate a shopping list with items sorted by category (or grocery store isle), nicely formatted in Markdown.

All you need to do is double-check the list and remove things you already have or don’t want to buy, to copy it into your notes app and take it with you to the supermarket. Unless you want to take it a step further by adding it to the Reminders app on iOS/macOS. Be warned, it gets a little geeky from here on.

The Shortcut

Having a shopping list is essential for me if I would rather not return home forgetting half the things I planned to buy and replacing those items with snacks and sweets we didn’t really need.

Having ADHD makes it hard to keep things in my mind if I’m subjected to the endless waves of colourful packages on the supermarket shelves, so I learned over the years not to go shopping without a list. What is even better than a list?

A list that allows me to check off items I put in the cart. For this, we have several options. ChatGPT can output the shopping list in various formats, including Markdown checkboxes (using the - [ ] pattern). Markdown is supported by many note-taking apps such as Notion, Obsidian or NotePlan. Pasting the list into these apps will render them as a checklist, and you’re done.

In iOS 17 (public release date 18th of September 2023) the default Reminders app received a really neat little feature. Now you can create a list and set its type to “Shopping” which automatically sorts the items on the list based on grocery store aisle.

I know ChatGPT already did it for us, but I like experimenting, and I also like the Reminders app, so I wanted to try if I could do it without having to manually replicate the list.

It turns out this is pretty simple thanks to the Shortcuts app. If you don’t know, Shortcuts is an app developed by Apple to allow simple automations with pre-made blocks that perform certain tasks. It is essentially programming without writing code, although it also allows you to write and run scripts, but for this purpose, we won’t need to.

To achieve my goal, I need to perform the following steps:

• Outside the shortcut
• Generate a shopping list with ChatGPT
• Copy the response to the clipboard
• In the shortcut
• Paste from the clipboard
• Remove lines that aren’t list items (i.e. don’t start with *, -, -[ ] or - [x]), and clear out the Markdown tags so that we’re left with the item titles only
• Split the text into lines
• iterate through the lines
• Add a new item to the shopping list.

It was easier than I thought it would be. The Shortcuts app lacks most of the methods we know from modern programming languages. However, it has a replace text node that supports regular expressions, or regex for short. If you don’t know regex, don’t worry, it’s an alien-like sequence of symbols that describe patterns of text.

I was able to stitch together a regular expression that matches the following markdown character sequences *, -, - [ ] or - [x] and matches entire lines that are either empty or don’t start with the mentioned sequences. It looks like this:

(?m)^(\s*[-*]\s+\[[ xX]\]\s+|[-*]\s+|.*\s*)

Note the (?m), it is the multiline flag. Apple decided the flags belong at the beginning of the regular expression instead of the end. Thanks to the Automators forum for the information, I never would have guessed it myself.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let’s run the Shortcut (and make sure to have a shopping list on the clipboard).

It works as expected. In macOS Sonoma’s new Reminders app it immediately auto-sorts the items. If you don’t want to build the shortcut on your own, can download the it from here.

Conclusion

ChatGPT isn’t just a nifty tool for generating text; it’s a versatile utility that can genuinely simplify daily tasks and bring order to the chaos of domestic life.

For those of us who dread the cyclical dilemma of “What’s for dinner?” it’s a genuine game-changer. It takes the grind out of meal planning, offers suggestions to fit our specific needs, and even generates a shopping list — eliminating the mundane parts of the process.

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