Yes, Chef! Let AI Do Your Meal Planning
If your household is anything like ours, texts start pinging at 5p every night. “What’s for dinner?” And if your schedule is anything like ours, meal planning falls by the wayside by Tuesday afternoon. Rather than order out (again!), or fight rush hour to get to the grocery store, click over to Claude or your go-to LLM and let it plan your weekly meals complete with calorie count, shopping list, estimated cost, and recipes. It should take you under six minutes to devise your menus using our prompts below. We made it easy for you to simply CUT & PASTE our prompts below and edit to your specific needs.
## THE MASTER PROMPT
Plan 5 dinners for Monday through Friday.
Household: [2 adults, 1 teenager]
Restrictions: [no pork, one of us is gluten-free]
We love: [lemon, Thai flavors, sheet pan dinners, tacos]
We won't eat: [mushrooms, cilantro]
Weeknight limit: [30 minutes of active cooking]
Budget: [$150 for the week]
Nutrition goal: [30g protein per person per dinner, around 600 calories]
Stores: [Trader Joe's and Safeway]
#GIVE IT Rules:
1. Use only real, highly-rated recipes written by actual humans (chefs, dietitians, food bloggers) on the open web. Search for them, don't invent anything, and link every source. No paywalled sites (skip NYT Cooking, Bon Appétit, and anything that makes me subscribe to see the ingredients). Skip AI-generated recipe farms. Tell me the creator's name for each one so I can check them out.
2. Pull protein and calories from the creator's own nutrition info.
3. For each dinner list: dish, creator, active time, total time, cost per meal, protein and calories per serving.
4. Pick recipes that share ingredients so nothing gets wasted. Show me which ingredients do double duty.
5. Give me ONE grocery list organized by store section with an estimated total.
6. If I'm over budget, tell me the cheapest swap.
7. Format it so I can scan it on my phone in the store.
## THE FOLLOW-UPS
Paste these in the same chat, one at a time, as needed.
**Photo of your fridge and pantry, then:**
Here's what I already have. Rework the plan to use this up first and shrink the grocery list to only what I'm missing.
**Not sure a source is legit:**
Who is behind each of these recipes? Tell me if they're a trained chef, a registered dietitian, or a home cook with a following, and how long the site has been around. Flag anything that looks like an AI content farm.
**Hate one night:**
Swap Wednesday for something that uses the same grocery list.
**Batch cooking:**
Turn Sunday's [roast chicken] into two more meals this week that don't taste like leftovers.
**Screenshot of this week's sale flyer, then:**
Rebuild the plan around these deals where it makes sense and tell me what I'd save.
**Tracking protein:**```
Total the week's protein and calories per person per day. Flag any day that's short and give me a whole-food snack (no powders) that fixes it.
**Last step:**
Format the final plan as a checklist: dinners with links and cook times on top, grocery list by store section underneath.
## FILLING IN THE BRACKETS
- **We love:** name flavors, not cuisines. "Lemon, garlic, anything charred" beats "Italian."
- **We won't eat:** be petty. It listens.
- **Time:** say active time. A stew that simmers unattended for two hours is a 20-minute recipe.
- **Budget:** give a number. "Cheap" means nothing.
- **Protein:** if you don't know your number, [Dr. Stacy Sims](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8p1yXHxs8U) does.
- **Sources:** if you want to steer it, name the humans you trust. Our free, no-paywall regulars: [The Real Food Dietitians](https://therealfooddietitians.com/) (two RDNs), [Feel Good Foodie](https://feelgoodfoodie.net/) (Yumna Jawad), [Jar of Lemons](https://www.jaroflemons.com/) (Christine McMichael), [Eating Bird Food](https://www.eatingbirdfood.com/) (Brittany Mullins), [Ambitious Kitchen](https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/) (Monique Volz), and [Fit Foodie Finds](https://fitfoodiefinds.com/) (Lee Funke). Add "pull at least three of these from [creator names]" to the master prompt.
The trick to using AI as your sous chef is crystal clarity—getting as specific as possible. As in life, your output is only as good as your inputs. These are habits we’re helping you to build with THE WHAT AI, our new Web App with practical lessons sourced from credible creators around the Web to harness the power of AI to make our work and lives easier.
[Get on the beta →](https://www.thewhatlist.com/the-what-ai)
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