As a busy mom, coming up with fresh and exciting meal ideas can feel like an endless struggle, especially after a weekend of preparing multiple meals and snacks for the hangry masses. By Sunday evening, my fridge looks sadder than a millennial's houseplant, and my creativity is more depleted than the Sahara Desert. That's when I turn to AI assistants to resuscitate my meal planning mojo.
One of my go-to tricks is using ChatGPT or Claude to generate meal plans tailored to my unique needs and my family's *totally reasonable* preferences. By feeding it details like my target macros and any unwanted ingredients, my AI Assistant hooks me up with a diverse menu of recipes that'll keep my people fed and my sanity intact.
But the real magic happened when I recently handed over fridge/pantry reconnaissance to an AI assistant. All I had to do was snap a pic of my sad fridge sitch (see Exhibit A below) and (in this case, Claude) works its culinary sorcery to whip up recipes using only my on-hand ingredients.
As you can see, my pre-grocery fridge was looking pretty tired. But Claude managed to craft meal ideas from this motley crew of wilted greens, some eggs that are probably still good, and a desiccated lemon that's older than Betty White. While I typically engage in a little banter with the AI to refine things, even the initial ideas were a massive timesaver.
For anyone who finds themselves in an all-too-frequent meal-planning fugue state, an AI assistant can be a total lifesaver. Not only does it relieve that food creativity slump, but it encourages more variety than yet another rotation of quesadillas. Try it! Let me know if you use AI to take some of that meal time work off your plate tonight!
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