Meal Planning With ChatGPT: Can AI Meal Plan Better Than Me?

Today's video we are doing some pantry cooking with a twist. I am going on a trip with my family in a few days, so I needed just a couple of meals and was feeling not so inspired.

So instead of coming up with recipes on my own, I turned to ChatGPT and asked it for ideas! Let’s take a look at the ChatGPT meal plan that I received.

ChatGPT is an AI website, which interacts with you by searching the Internet for answers to your questions. You do have to make an account, and then you send in your questions, or prompts, and it does its best to accommodate you.

I do not know too much about it, and I have never used ChatGPT for meal planning before, but it seems like a fun way to come up with some pantry cooking ideas that we could make over the next three days before we go on our trip.

My initial ChatGPT meal plan prompt was “What should I make for dinner for the next three days?”.

This was not specific enough: it pulled up some recipes, but obviously not all of them suited me. For example, it suggested a tofu stir fry, and I had no tofu in my kitchen.

Then I specified that I had a lot of potatoes. It suggested curry, and again, we do not really have the stuff to make curry at home. It kept suggesting recipes that required ingredients I did not have, so I ended up typing up a list of everything I had at home.

Finally, it responded with three realistic recipes: creamy chicken and vegetable skillet, Italian sausage pasta, and beef and vegetable stir fry.

It did not give me any specific instructions, temperatures, times or measurements, but I will just go with it.

1. Stir fry

First, I made teriyaki stir fry. I did not have as many vegetables as I would like to for a true stir fry, so I just made it into teriyaki beef. I started by putting some beef from the freezer in a pan with some oil, salt, and pepper, and then also a chopped onion because I had half an onion sitting in my fridge that needed to get used up.

While this was cooking, I began working on my sauce. I looked up a recipe online for a regular basic teriyaki sauce and found this amazing recipe. It makes a lot of sauce - I had around three times the amount of sauce that I actually needed for my meat, but it was really tasty, so I definitely do recommend this beef teriyaki sauce recipe, and it came together really quickly.

I served the beef on top of some rice, and this meal was great. It would be even better with a side of broccoli or some green green beans, or some other veggies in there just to give some more variety, but it was really good as is.

2. Italian sausage pasta

I was very excited when ChatGPT recommended making chicken sausage pasta.

I have had one open on my web browser on my phone for a while now and I really wanted to try it, but never made it a priority because most of the ingredients are pretty shelf stable or would stay in the freezer or fridge for quite a long time.

For this recipe, I chopped up some chicken sausage and sautéed it with a little bit of oil in a frying pan while my noodles were boiling. I cooked some broccoli in a small pot of water as well.

For the sauce, I put half a jar of pasta sauce and a half cup of heavy whipping cream into a pan. I seasoned it with a bit of salt, pepper, garlic powder, and Italian seasoning just until it looked and tasted right.

Next, I stirred it all together with the crispy sausage. I made sure to simmer the heavy cream and marinara sauce together for about five minutes just until it started to get thick, then I drained my pasta and added it straight into the sauce.

Finally, I stirred everything together to make sure that all of the noodles got covered and then I let this simmer for an additional two to three minutes or until it looked like it was thick enough.

This was amazing and it made such good leftovers. I am definitely going to be making this one more often because it was super easy to make but it tasted like a really expensive dish that took a long time to prepare.

You can definitely top this with some mozzarella or parmesan cheese just to give it an even creamier texture and this goes really really well with a side of veggies or garlic bread.

3. Chicken and vegetables

This last meal did not go completely according to plan, since I ran out of time and did not fully follow the recipe recommended by ChatGPT, but it still ended up tasting really good.

My plan was to make chicken and roasted veggies with a nice creamy sauce. In reality, while I did make the chicken and the veggies, I did not have time to make a sauce.

Instead, I chopped all the veggies, added olive oil and about a teaspoon of salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, garlic powder, and onion powder.

Then I stirred it all together and popped that in the oven at 425F for about 20 minutes. I also had my chicken cooking on the stove with a little bit of olive oil and all the same seasonings.

To serve, I added a bit of feta cheese on there, and it turned out really good.

ChatGPT meal plan

I hope you have enjoyed this article, and now you know how to use ChatGPT to make a meal plan.

Would you trust AI with your dinner choices? Have you used ChatGPT for any other purposes in the past? Leave a comment and tell me all about it!