#625 Meal Planning Made Easy with AI: Kathi’s Insider Tips
625 – Meal Planning Made Easy with AI: Kathi’s Insider Tips
Have you ever struggled with this age-old question?
“What’s for dinner?”
In this episode of Clutter-Free Academy, Kathi and Roger Lipp take you on a journey through the incredible world of AI-driven meal planning. Say goodbye to dinner stress and discover how ethical, efficient AI tools can change your kitchen routine for the better. Join Kathi and Roger as they share their experiences with AI, making home management simpler and more effective than ever. with tips and ideas such as:
- How to use AI to generate delicious, healthy, and budget-friendly recipes.
- Tips for making AI your ultimate meal-planning assistant, especially for families with dietary restrictions.
- The game-changing method to create categorized shopping lists through AI
As promised, here are the Meal Planning prompts that Kathi and Roger use to direct AI to plan their meals:
- “Create a 7-day meal plan for a family of four, focusing on balanced nutrition and variety.”
- “Suggest five quick and healthy weeknight dinner recipes using chicken breast.”
- “Plan a vegetarian meal prep for the week, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner options.”
- “Generate a grocery list for a week’s worth of Mediterranean-style meals.”
- “Recommend three easy breakfast ideas for someone trying to increase their protein intake.”
- “Design a meal plan for someone with diabetes, emphasizing low glycemic index foods.”
- “Suggest ways to incorporate more leafy greens into my daily meals.”
- “Create a budget-friendly meal plan for a college student, using simple ingredients.”
- “Plan a week of meals that can be prepared in 30 minutes or less that my kids would like.”
- “Suggest creative ways to use leftover chicken, carrots, onions and French bread to reduce food waste in my meal planning.”
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Sabbath Soup: Weekly Menus and Rhythms to Make Space for a Day of Rest
Kathi Lipp gives readers an easy-to-follow process for meal planning and prep, so that they can enjoy a full day each week of real rest and refreshment.
Could you use a break from cooking (and everything else) once a week? Not only is rest vital for your mind and body, it’s good for your soul too. God designed us to enter into Sabbath rest one day per week, but as you know, meals still need to be made. Your family still needs to be fed.
Sabbath Soup includes convenient, seasonal meal plans that take the guesswork out of shopping and cooking. More than just a collection of delicious recipes—including main dishes, breads, breakfasts, desserts, salads, sides, and yes, soups—this is your guide to establishing a weekly rhythm and routine of meal planning and prep that allows you to have a true day off.
Do something good for your soul and experience the peace that comes with a full day dedicated to spending time with God, family, and friends. Savor your Sabbath as you proudly proclaim, “Soup’s on!”
Preorder your copy of Sabbath Soup: Weekly Menus and Rhythms to Make Space for a Day of Rest here. Preorder offer ends October 8, 2024.
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Meet Our Guest
Roger Lipp
Transcript
Well, hey friends, welcome to Clutter -Free Academy, where our goal is to help you live with less clutter and more life. And I am here with my AI expert. Okay, so he would not consider himself an AI expert. He is an AI practitioner, but in this household, he is the AI expert. It’s Roger Lipp. Hey, Rog. We do a lot.
Roger (00:33.652)
Hello.
Kathi (00:37.955)
We spend a lot of time thinking about AI in this house.
Roger (00:42.004)
Yeah, I’m thinking about getting business cards made up with AI expert or AI practitioner, yes.
Kathi (00:46.787)
AI practitioner. Yes, yes. Now, I know that there are going to be some people who are listening to this who are like freaked out that we’re talking about AI. I’m just going to give a quick disclaimer. If you are living in the modern world, you are already interacting with AI probably every single day, probably in a bunch of different ways. We just, we spend a lot of time, especially on the writing side of what we do.
talking about how to ethically use AI in our business, in our creativity, but that has leaked over into our personal life. Hasn’t it, Roger? I mean, we’re using it. Yeah. So.
Roger (01:26.964)
100 % we yeah, yeah, we use it all. I I used AI the other night to identify an animal that I wasn’t able to get a picture of, but I described it to the AI and told it where I lived and it identified it. It’s probably a marmot. OK. A marmot.
Kathi (01:39.235)
Right?
Kathi (01:47.651)
a marmot, which I knew that that was an animal or a Vegemite spread in, you know, something. But yeah, it’s fascinating, right? Where, where I, as I, you know, two years ago, when something came up, I would Google and I’d be like, you know, I describing it in Google, and then you kind of have to go read the stuff and everything. And what AI is doing is kind of gathering all of that for you. And with all the conditions you’ve put into that and said, here’s what it most likely is. Did it give you any second tertiary animals? Yeah, right. Yeah. It was pretty, it was pretty convinced that.
Roger (02:26.996)
I could have asked for some backup just in case. It was pretty convinced, but I may go back and see, all right, if it’s not a marmot, what might it be? Could it be a fox? Could it be this or that? I don’t know. It was pretty big.
Kathi (02:40.995)
Yeah.
So, you know, some of the ways that we’ve used AI have been in banking, in planning our garden, in household projects, Aaron’s List. I mean, the list goes on and on. But today I want to talk about meal planning. Because I just want to say, the longer I meal plan, the more I recognize that this is probably the most complex household chore that I have. And, you know, I don’t think we give meal planning and cooking the props that it deserves. I know that almost every woman I know struggles with it and some guys, but let’s just be honest, in the Lipp household, this pretty much falls to me. But you also have to capture the mice and take them out to the… nether regions of our property. So, you know, right, right. Yeah, the two do not cross over. So I’m, I’m fine with this, you know, we kind of said when we started this whole adventure, you’re kind of responsible for the outside, I’m kind of responsible for the inside, but we cross over all the time on this. But meal planning mostly falls to me. And the more I do it, the the more I realize what a complex set of
Roger (03:41.076)
Not to be confused with meal planning.
Kathi (04:08.259)
Actions this is and so I have used AI to really help in the meal planning So I wanted to give some examples, but I also wanted you to kind of describe how people can do this for themselves Now we use Claude for our meal for everything now Yeah, well almost everything it doesn’t matter Claude Claude. Let’s talk about Claude during this podcast
And do you want to give a reason why here in the year of our Lord, you know, the middle of 2024, why we’re using Claude as our AI buddy?
Roger (04:46.004)
Yeah, it may change. It may change in six months. It may change in three weeks. I don’t know. It’s a bit of a horse race. Who’s in the front and who is providing the best service for us? We use a paid version of Claude, Claude .ai. That’s C -L -A -U -D -E .ai. You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT. That’s awesome as well. You can go to Chat .OpenAI .com, I think.
Kathi (04:50.307)
Mm -hmm.
Kathi (05:14.019)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Roger (05:14.836)
for ChatGPT, that’s great as well. We have switched over to Claude because it has more privacy, more security features, more features that are especially important for authors in the context of keeping their work private. But it’s also very good in terms of being able to go back and forth with a conversation for a long time. Chat GPT starts losing its way after a while, but Claude can keep in the conversation and keep going. So that’s two of the reasons why I think Claude is a good choice for folks.
Kathi (05:44.195)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Kathi (05:50.371)
Yeah.
Kathi (05:58.915)
It has the wisdom of an 80 year old and the sharp mind of a 35 year old. And so that’s the intersection we’re trying to work within. So I wanted to describe some of the ways that I am currently using Claude for meal planning and some of my favorite features. So let me talk about this and you can help us as we go along. Go ahead, Raj. Yeah. Yeah.
Roger (06:03.796)
Ha ha ha ha!
I’m sorry.
Roger (06:22.1)
Kathi, I wonder before we get into that, we could talk a little bit about some of the early stuff that happened with AI and cooking. We watched a YouTube channel for a while where there was an AI cooking challenge and they would take recipes straight off of AI and cook with them literally, you know, following to the T. And the results were not that impressive.
Kathi (06:47.491)
It was not good.
Roger (06:52.244)
So two things in that. One, AI has come a long way since then. And the second, since then, that was what, four months ago. But AI has come a long way since then. And then the other thing is to always take what you get from AI with a little bit of a grain of, a little bit of skepticism. And.
Kathi (06:57.251)
Mm -hmm.
Kathi (07:02.851)
Mm. Right? Yeah.
Kathi (07:09.443)
Right.
Kathi (07:19.203)
No, you should have said grain of salt because this is a cooking episode.
Roger (07:22.324)
Yes, grain of salt. Yes. Exactly.
Kathi (07:27.331)
Yeah, so I would say if you get a recipe and it looks crazy, maybe go back, you know, try again. But I will say, so let’s talk about one of my first uses for this. Sometimes I have a mishmash of leftovers, ingredients, things in my refrigerator. And I’m like, I am all out of creativity. My job is a creative job. And it’s like sometimes I’m just tapped out when it’s five o ‘clock and it’s time to cook something for dinner. So explain what a prompt is, Roger.
Roger (08:04.404)
Yeah, a prompt is basically how we talk to the AI. You can think of a prompt as the thing that you type in to the Google search box when you’re looking for something, right? That’s you’re prompting Google to go out and find something on the Internet for you. That’s the same kind of thing that we’re talking about with Claude, except that the prompt can be much much more detailed. You can give it all kinds of parameters. You know, when you’re searching for Google, in Google if you get too wordy with your prompt, the results actually start getting worse. You know, you have to be careful to put the right word at the front and the back, you know, it becomes a whole thing. But with Claude and the AIs, the more you give it, the better the answer is.
Kathi (08:46.627)
Mm -hmm.
Roger (09:00.884)
So you can be as detailed as you want. So you could, when I was talking about, could you help me identify this animal? I was literally typing, hey, I live at 3 ,600 feet in the Sierra mountains and I just saw an animal that’s the shape of a jumbo size squirrel, but about three feet long and maybe 18 inches high. Any idea what this could be? And you know, that.
Kathi (09:27.875)
Mm -hmm.
Roger (09:30.26)
That’s the nature of a prompt.
Kathi (09:33.571)
Yeah, okay. So guys, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go listen to some of our fabulous sponsors who keep this podcast free for all. And when we come back, I’m gonna share some of my favorite prompts with you for getting the results I want to help me with all the things cooking. So we’ll be right back.
Kathi (10:05.315)
Okay friends, we are back and I just wanna share some of my favorite prompts that help me get my meal planning done. So if it’s five o ‘clock and I need to get something on the table and I have not planned, which happens sometimes, you know, we had leftovers, whatever. So I can go to Claude and say, hey, I’ve got chicken, spinach and sweet potatoes and a full pantry. Like so a full pantry, you know with spices and oils and things like that. Can you suggest a healthy dinner recipe and Or I could even say can you suggest three? delicious healthy dinner recipes now, why did I add the word delicious Roger?
Roger (10:54.74)
Claude and all the AI seem to do better when you give it some adjectives. It just puts it in the right frame of mind. I don’t know that I can even describe why it works, but it does. It also works if you sometimes stroke its ego. You know, if you are an expert chef, can you help me plan a recipe because, you know, I have chicken, spinach, and sweet potatoes.
Kathi (11:18.147)
Mm -hmm.
Roger (11:24.34)
Sometimes it gets better answers.
Kathi (11:24.451)
Yeah, so yes, so you know, our first category for prompts is recipe recommendations. So I have chicken, spinach, and sweet potatoes. Can you suggest a tasty, healthy dinner recipe? It would be a great prompt. I’m looking for a delicious vegetarian appetizer to bring to a party. Any ideas? And so both of those will give you some ideas.
With the vegetarian one, I would definitely say here are some ingredients I want to use you know Cabbage or you know cheese whatever it is. So that’s one way I would love to use it number two meal planning Can you create a balanced five -day dinner menu for a family of four? My son won’t eat green peppers or mushrooms and I’m allergic to dairy. Claude can handle all of that, which is amazing. I find this to be such a great gift for somebody who has dietary restrictions. If you’re vegan, vegetarian, lactose intolerant, gluten intolerant, this would be, now,
Again, check all your ingredients to make sure that they line up with what your diet actually is. I just learned the other day that Worcestershire sauce is not vegetarian. That it has, I think it’s fish in it? Yeah, I had no idea. Yeah.
Roger (13:04.98)
Like fish, yeah, I think it has fish, yeah. Yeah, so many things have fish. Hey, have you had a chance to use this for like party planning or retreat planning for meals?
Kathi (13:18.339)
I have not done, I have done party planning. So I’ll tell you one thing that I’ve done this week. We are, Roger doesn’t even know this. Our bake sale was just canceled like two minutes ago during, well, this podcast. Yeah. Breaking news. If you were planning to come to the Omo Ranch bake sale, it’s not this weekend. Yeah. Because it’s, it’s going to be the middle of May. And of course we’re, we’re predicted with snow. So, you know, that’s just where we live.
Roger (13:32.148)
okay. Good to know.
Kathi (13:47.875)
Anyway, but it helped me plan out the entire bake sale like here are all the things you need to bring with you here Like it can help with those kind of things which I think is fascinating But also when we have retreats here, we have people who are vegetarian. We have people who can’t eat gluten so I can start What I probably would do is say, here is what we normally would eat at a retreat. Can you give me some suggestions because of these modifications to the diet? And it would be a genius for that. So.
Roger (14:28.724)
Yeah, it’s part of our intake form for a retreat. Do you have any food allergies or other food restrictions? So we can just give those to Claude to create a plan for us. Or at least to start a plan for us. Yeah, we’re not just going to blindly trust. OK, rip it off the printer and give it to somebody. Here’s our shopping list. No, we don’t do that.
Kathi (14:33.347)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Kathi (14:39.843)
It’s amazing. Right. No, no, no, we’re gonna verify, absolutely.
No, we don’t do that. But here’s what I love about it. It gets over the blank page. Because when I sit down to meal plan, Roger, I can’t remember anything I’ve ever cooked in my entire life. I cannot remember anything that you’ve ever liked to eat. Like I feel like I’m starting, go ahead.
Roger (15:10.676)
You sometimes ask me, what’s your favorite thing that I cook? And I always stare at you with a blank stare. It’s like, huh, I like it all. I know.
Kathi (15:21.923)
Yeah.
Which sounds fake, by the way. Okay, so here’s another way that I love to meal plan. I need to plan five days worth of packable work lunches. What do you suggest? So, you know, some of my favorite things are chicken salad, or you don’t like to give it some of your favorite things, but just, and here’s the beautiful thing. If it comes up with five days and the middle day is, well, Kathi, you could have a stuffed green pepper with, now, Roger, what would be my response to eating a stuffed green pepper for lunch?
Roger (16:04.82)
no.
Kathi (16:06.083)
No. I hate green peppers. I hate them so – Yes. So what what could I then do with Claude who’s suggesting green peppers on Wednesday and Friday?
Roger (16:09.012)
You loved me.
Roger (16:20.532)
So this is the beautiful thing about these AIs is that the chat inside of these means you can go back and forth. Thank you for that menu suggestion. I don’t really like green peppers. Can you suggest some alternatives? So it doesn’t lose track of what it’s already the conversation so far, but it can kind of pick up from there and modify things. Well, you know, you can omit the green pepper. You could substitute in a zucchini or whatever is appropriate. So it really does have that chat aspect. You’re going back and forth with the AI. That wasn’t quite right, and here’s a suggestion. It’s OK to tell it that it got it wrong. It will apologize. It’ll trip over its own feet to apologize for getting it wrong for you. And we tend to end with thank you.
Kathi (16:58.979)
Yeah.
Kathi (17:14.883)
It’s amazing.
Yes, we do because we’re people pleasers and polite. Yes But you know if the robots do rise up, I want them to think of me favorably. I’m just kidding you guys. Okay Okay, let’s talk about my absolute favorite way to use AI This this is the game changer you guys. This is the this is the everything so my prompt would be
Roger (17:19.7)
Wait.
Yes.
Roger (17:28.596)
Ha ha ha!
Kathi (17:45.219)
Here are the seven recipes I’m going to cook this week. And I would put those recipes in if I’m getting them from, you know, if I’m retyping them from a book, if I’m getting them off the internet, whatever it is. Now.
Roger (18:00.468)
So you would cut and paste the whole recipe, all seven of the recipes. OK.
Kathi (18:02.627)
I would cut and paste the whole recipe, all seven of the recipes. AI, Claude, please make me a shopping list categorized by the aisles in a grocery store. And so I’ve got my dairy, I’ve got my bakery, I’ve got my canned goods, I’ve got my produce, I’ve got my meat and seafood. Guys?
Roger (18:31.156)
and it’s all laid out for you to just pick it up while you’re shopping.
Kathi (18:35.395)
Yes, so I take that shopping list and I go through my kitchen and I’m like, okay, well, I’ve already got onions. I’ve already got canned broth. I’ve already got garlic. I’ve already got frozen chicken. And so here’s what’s left to purchase. And then I just go onto my little Sam’s Club app or I go on to Target or to Rayleigh’s, which is a local grocery store. I type it all in, I place my order and I just drive there on Wednesdays and pick up all my groceries and my life is the best it’s ever been. It makes me so happy, so, so, so happy. I can’t even stand it. Yeah.
Roger (19:11.86)
Wonder.
Roger (19:19.156)
Hey, Kathi, for folks on a super tight budget, I know you’ve also played with adding prices to that. How did that work out?
Kathi (19:23.267)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Well, it added out really, really well. So if you want to keep like, so I would say if you’re on a super tight budget, here’s what I would say is don’t plan the recipes, plan the ingredients. So what do you already have? Maybe what’s on sale at your local grocery store or? You know, what’s in season right now if you have a garden and plant. So reverse engineer it. So this would be more like the recipe recommendations that we talked at top. And I would say, hey Claude, I’m on a super tight budget. I only have $25 for groceries this week. This is what I have in my freezer, my fridge and my pantry. Please suggest the most budget friendly but delicious recipes that I can come up with. And I also believe it’s a great idea to keep track of prices. Some people are able to keep track of prices in their head. I’m just not one of those people. But I do like to say, you know, here at Sam’s, you know, I can put my Sam’s receipt into Claude and say, can you give me the prices here for everything. So it’ll say chicken breasts are this much or garlic is this much. And I can start to keep track of those in one clod conversation. And I can say, hey, chicken at Safeway is 9 .99 for this frozen pack of breasts. Is that a better price than at Sam’s? And it will tell me.
It’s just genius. I love it so much. But figure out, tell Claude what your problem is. Is it that you don’t have enough time? You don’t have enough energy? You don’t have enough money? What is the resource that’s the most struggling for you? Here’s another thing. What if you’re in a situation where you’re living in a camper right now? Claude, I need meals that…
Kathi (21:44.003)
can be prepared in the microwave. Or, you know, like tell Claude your circumstance and Claude will help you figure it out. Claude, I live in a food desert and the only store I have near me is Dollar General. Here’s, you know, and there, you could go and either Claude will know what’s typically at Dollar General or there’s an article online that says here are the foods that are typically at Dollar General. And you can figure out what it is that you could prepare. And by the way, if you, I think it’s Dollar Tree Meals. Okay, so there’s a Instagram or Dollar Tree Meals. If you’re on a super tight budget, I would go follow her. Yeah.
Roger (22:21.78)
Thanks.
Roger (22:36.34)
It’s almost like you’re playing a guy’s grocery game with Claude, right?
Kathi (22:39.651)
It’s it’s so true because on guys grocery tape game. You’ve got a limitation of money time Energy and you know what’s available or and you’ve got this specific challenge. I mean women are okay I know some guys cook but guys it’s mostly falling to us. We are playing guys grocery game every single day We’re trying to stay in budget. We’re trying to get something on the table quickly all of that Okay, other things that you can do cooking questions. This recipe calls for buttermilk, but I don’t have any. What can I use instead? How long can I safely store cooked chicken legs in the fridge? Those are great things. So cooking questions. Nutritional analysts. If you’re trying to up your fiber or trying to lower your macros or up your macros, like whatever it is, Claude can help with that and makes meal suggestions. Batch cooking and freezer meals.
What are some good recipes for making a big batch and freezing portions for later? Or how should I prep and freeze the components for this casserole recipe so I can assemble and cook it later? I love these things. I love these things. And by the way, we’re going to put all these prompts into the into the show notes so that you can just go grab them and see what we’re working with. And finally, number seven, utilizing leftovers. I have leftover grilled vegetables and quinoa.
How can I turn them into a new meal? I think that’s such a great question. What’s a creative way to use up extra roast chicken from last night’s dinner? We’re gonna be using this a lot as our zucchinis come in. Like, we’re gonna have a million, Claude’s gonna be helping us with the zucchini and tomato question all summer long, and it’s gonna be great. Roger, did I miss anything?
Roger (24:31.956)
You know, I love the idea of using this for things like food allergies and food preferences and those kinds of things. If it’s super important to you, like it’s important for your health, Claude can certainly help, but always double check the results. Don’t ever trust it blindly. Yeah, exactly.
Kathi (24:52.099)
Trust but verify. Yeah, yeah. If you’re like, Claude said I could use Worcestershire sauce and I’m a vegetarian, that’s something new I didn’t know I could use. No, if you’re surprised by an answer, and I don’t see a lot of mistakes with Claude, but I’m always going to verify. Just like, you know, Roger, if you told me, Worcestershire sauce is vegetarian and being a vegetarian is important to me.
I love you, but I’m not gonna trust you all the time. I’m going to verify. And so we, yes. Absolutely, absolutely. Roger, this has been super fun. And I really think that this is gonna be life -changing for a lot of people who feel stressed by cooking dinner every night, because it is every night. And I think that it’s gonna be really, really important.
Roger (25:23.828)
The more important it is to you, the more important it is to check the output.
Kathi (25:45.763)
And it’s not just dinner, it’s three meals a day. And so if Claude can help, I know wanting to eat three times a day, it’s ridiculous. Thanks for hanging out with me, Raj. Friends, you’ve been listening to Clutter -Free Academy. I’m Kathi Lipp. Now, go live the clutter -free life you’ve always wanted to live.
