Honestly, this may be the area of my life where AI has made the biggest daily difference. I'm a trained chef but most nights I just tell it what ingredients I've got around and ask it to suggest options. Dramatically reduces the burden of meal-planning and the annoyance of mismatched leftovers.

I talked a little bit about this on local NPR a few months back.
https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2024/11/18/artificial-intelligence-everyday

I have an app where I can put the ingredients in and search my saved recipes (probably about 500 recipes at this point). And I can make a good stir fry quickly. I still chuckled while reading this article this morning. I think what's missed is a certain elemental thing: We have to eat. It kind of makes sense that we have to think about it a lot. Somehow we have to eat, as we are animals. If it weren't a core part of our lives, something would be wrong.

Related to the AI comment above, my friend Tom recently sent me this Instagram reel that was probably a TikTok... it kinda stuck with me: Using UI for meal planning

This is totally backwards. We’re humans. We cook. We evolved our tiny digestive system and our calorie-consuming brains because our ancestors learned to cook. If we don’t have time to gather food, plan our meals, and cook, then we don’t have time to be human.

Which is to say, modern expectations don’t leave time for normal human existence.

I enjoy cooking but don't particularly like complex, time consuming recipes. There's a lot of teriyaki pork with misc. fillers (egg, peas, etc.) in brown rice, or burritos, or big batches of chili with a week of leftovers, etc. Various tacos with shrimp, or carnitas, or barbacoa, often with pico de gallo and rice or beans. Simple food with complex flavors, made quickly or without much effort.

There is no greater joy in my life sometimes when I realize my family was able to eat all the produce before it goes bad. Or we ate all the deli meat. I still daydream of a pill that solves my hunger on days where I don't feel like preparing a meal, but coming to terms that it's fine to eat frozen fish and frozen vegetables with instant potatoes is sometimes close enough to a pill. The next pain point is that the treadmill of dinner just leads to the Sisyphean task of washing dishes; I want to cook because I don't believe others can cook with the same efficiency of me when it comes to limiting the amount of dirty cookware.

At the risk of sounding like a podcast ad read, I feel obligated to sing the praises of Hello Fresh. We've been using it for several years, 3-4 nights a week. It really does eliminate the planning, shopping, measuring, having the wrong amounts of things and watching them rot, etc. All while reducing the daily decision-making down to "hey, which of these 3 or 4 pre-approved options sounds best tonight?" And in the case where none sounds great, or we don't feel like dealing with even modest cooking, then we eat out or order takeout. Huge quality of life improvement over the alternative. And the food is always pretty okay if not "surprisingly good!" Oh, and it's about the same price as grocery shopping, maybe cheaper when you take into account buying the wrong quantities of things leading to food waste, impulse buys you pick up because they look good while shopping, etc.

Apparently I'm weird, because I look forward to cooking dinner every night. I make a weekly menu and plan meals to use up ingredients that come in packages larger than two people need. I enjoy the time I spend browsing through my cookbooks and past weekly lists deciding what to cook this week. I don't have to expend any more mental energy deciding what to make when I'm tired and hungry, because the list is on the fridge and the ingredients are to hand. After a long day "data sciencing", spending time preparing food that I like is relaxing. And yes, spreadsheets are involved.

Cooking is simple. Cooking to please a modern palate is hard.

My wife and I have been using cooksmarts (cooksmarts.com) for years, and it has made meal planning much more fun and varied. They don't send you any packets of food - just a meal plan each week, and a huge collection of recipes in case their plan isn't totally appealing to you that week. It's $5/month, but I feel like we eat a lot more different stuff, and the weekend meal planning is much-less fraught than before.

My 2 out of 3 rule...I try to meet 2 out of 3 of these rules for a family that has the usual crazy schedule with kids in school. 1. Make your food from ingredients, 2. Eat together, 3. Eat healthy. Eating together is the hardest thing, but these have been my rules since the kids were born. It has been worth it as I think we all have healthier eating habits and value the effort it takes.

I found that living within walking distance of grocery stores really helped with this. I wouldn't have to plan out a whole week, just the next few days. I'd only buy what I knew we would eat. Plus, the walk got me outside and moving which is always welcome.

Of course, in America, being within walking distance of anything is a privilege.