One of the biggest problems I have with AI is that it can do so many things that it’s hard to know where to start. I decided to see if Claude could solve one of my biggest frustrations. The results were impressive, and I barely had to lift a finger.
Meal planning is a thankless task
It’s a never-ending source of stress
One of the things I hate the most is having to plan meals and buy food. It’s a task that never ends; you buy food for the week, cook it, eat it, and then you have to start all over again. Coming up with meal ideas is an effort, and then you have to buy all the food to make those meals.
Planning meals and going out to buy the ingredients takes up a lot of time. Even if we shop online and have the groceries delivered, you still have to take the time to add everything to your basket, and when it does come, some of the crucial items are often missing, so you can’t make what you’d planned.
My smart home and AI tools have helped take some mundane chores out of my hands, so I wondered if Claude would be able to make this one easier, too. I decided to see if I could come up with a workable plan with Claude’s help.
I wanted to create a system to make life easier
The plan was also to waste less food
My idea was fairly simple. I would set up a database of the meals that we like to cook, including all the relevant ingredients. I wanted to be able to select three meals for the week from that database, and have Claude select the remaining two meals in order to minimize waste.
For example, if there were ingredients left over from making the three meals I chose, Claude would select two recipes that would use up as many of those leftover ingredients as possible. The intent was that I’d finish the week with as little food waste as possible.
I decided to use Grocy in Home Assistant, which is a self-hosted grocery management system. I’d be able to add my recipes to Grocy as well as use it to track the ingredients that I’d bought. Claude would then be able to look at Grocy to find the optimal recipes to minimize food waste.
I should then be able to generate a shopping list in Grocy with all the ingredients I’d need for the week’s meals. I could either order the ingredients online or go out and buy them, then update Grocy to mark those ingredients as being in stock.
Claude did the grunt work for me
I sat and watched Claude fill in the data for me
I set up Grocy in Home Assistant which was simple enough to do. The next phase was adding some of my favorite recipes to Grocy. I wasn’t looking forward to this, as I was going to have to add a ton of recipes and their associated ingredients to Grocy, which was going to take a long time.
Then I realized that this is something Claude could do for me. Using Claude Cowork’s computer use features, I could let Claude access Grocy in Chrome, and it could add all the recipes for me. All I needed to do was provide the information, and Claude would add it for me.
Some recipes were from recipe books, others were online, and some were recipes I’d picked up along the way, but I was able to find similar versions of them online. I got Claude to adjust them to be for a family of four and told it to add them all to Grocy.
Claude found 50 GB of junk on my PC in 5 minutes—junk that BleachBit had missed
Claude found 50 GB of junk my disk cleaner missed—and it only took it 5 minutes.
Then I sat back and watched as Claude took over Chrome and started adding the recipes. I watched for a while because I was fascinated, but then went off and did something else while Claude did all the hard work for me.
It took some time to add everything to Grocy, and I had to make a couple of tweaks, but I ended up with all of the recipes added and the product categories created in Grocy, which is something that would have taken me a lot of work.
I now have a working system with very little effort
There’s still more I can add
Once the recipes were in place, I tested the system, which runs using Claude to optimize the remaining recipes. I got it to start from the assumption that my cupboard was bare, selected three recipes, and Claude chose two more recipes that used up as many of the leftover perishable ingredients as possible.
These were all then added to my shopping list in Grocy, so that I could buy or order everything I needed for the week’s meals. While this was a task that would normally take me a significant amount of time to complete, using Claude, I had a working prototype up and running far more quickly.
The system still isn’t complete; the next phase is to try to get Claude to add all the necessary ingredients to my shopping basket on my online grocery shopping site of choice. Then all I’ll need to do is check the list isn’t crazy and pay, and my ingredients will be on the way.
AI can take a lot of work off your hands
This is exactly what I want AI to do: take over dull, repetitive tasks that I’d rather not have to do myself. I’m less keen on it replacing my job, but for now, it’s saving me a lot of time and helping to remove one of my biggest frustrations.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
