Meal planning...again

I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to involve AI in our weekly meal planning. It’s one of those jobs that comes around every week and always seems to require more thought than it should. I tried using Siri for this, but she couldn’t string it all together into a cohesive process. However, this week I simply asked Claude to create a meal plan for three nights, including the recipes, ingredients and cooking instructions. Within seconds, it had come up with three meals and everything I needed to prepare them. I then took it a step further and asked it to schedule each meal in my calendar and add all the required ingredients to my shopping list. It did it without blinking.

Suddenly, a job that normally involves deciding what to cook, finding recipes, checking ingredients and writing a shopping list was essentially done for me. The real test will come over the coming weeks. I want to see whether Claude can keep suggesting different meals, remember what we have eaten recently and avoid repeating the same recipes too often. Ideally, it will gradually build an understanding of the types of food we enjoy while continuing to introduce a bit of variety. It feels like such an obvious use of AI now that I have tried it. Sometimes the best applications of technology aren’t complicated at all. They simply remove another small weekly chore.