How to use a recipe generator for meal planning

Have you ever used a recipe generator tool? 

While I love saving recipes from blogs across the Internet, magpie-like, to my various Pinterest boards for inspiration, sometimes they don’t match the reality of cooking at home. I usually have specific ingredients in my kitchen that I need to use up. This is where the magic of a custom recipe generator comes in. You can plug in the ingredients you have on hand, and have it create a meal idea just for you. 

Why use a recipe generator

There’s a bunch of reasons why it’s great to have a tool create custom recipes just for you:

• It comes up with ideas you may not have thought of on your own, like ways to prepare food or ingredients to pair. For example, in an example I’ll show you below, my recipe generator suggested using quinoa in a stir fry, or using hummus in a pasta sauce.
• It reduces food waste by helping you eat the food you already have, before it goes bad. Did you know wasted food in landfills is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions?
• You can save money – similarly, using what’s in your pantry, you can save money on groceries: a huge pain point in our inflation-ridden world right now. I estimate the average US household wastes $1,800 per year on uneaten food alone.
• You can customize recipes to your dietary requirements – need recipes that are vegan, or gluten free, or nut-free? When you create your own recipes with a generator, it’s easy to match them to your unique needs.
• And customize recipes to use the kitchen equipment you have – whether you have an Instant Pot, slow cooker, air fryer, grill, convection oven, etc. that you’re trying to make use of, or you don’t have those things and you’re trying to avoid recipes that use them, you can prompt your recipe generator accordingly to match your kitchen’s equipment.

How to use a recipe generator

Here I’ll walk you through how to use the free recipe generator template I created for you in Notion – you can make a copy here. What the template will do for you is make it super easy to create your own copy-and-paste prompt for AI, then provide a space for you to use that prompt to have Notion AI generate recipes for you.

In Step 1, click the button to create your recipe prompt. Customize each field to specify:

1. Ingredients to use – what you already have in your kitchen
2. Allergens to avoid
3. Available kitchen equipment – add or remove to match what you have available
4. Dietary restrictions – for example, vegan, low FODMAP, halal, low sodium, etc.
5. Whether your recipes should only include items from your ingredient list or can include other items

Here’s what that will look like:

For any of these fields, you are able to add your own options if what you’re looking for isn’t listed.

The template has taken all the info you input in step 1 and created an AI prompt for you. Now, you need to copy that prompt, and paste it into the AI block, like so:

Voila! A slate of recipes ready to try out. 

Of course, as with anything that involves AI, you’ll need to use your best judgement. Eyeball cooking times and ingredient proportions to sanity check them. If you’re ever not sure, use the generated recipe as a jumping-off point for a Google search to find a similar recipe. Use the recipe you find to guide your cooking method, but riff on the ingredients using the AI-generated recipe for inspiration.

How to streamline meal planning by using a recipe generator

The next step to level up is to make a weekly (or bi-weekly, or monthly) meal plan that utilizes your generated recipes, plus anything else you’re going to cook. I’ve created a template in Notion that brings together the recipe generator tool with other meal planning necessities. It allows you to save your generated recipes to Notion and also adds an inventory of your kitchen, a shopping list that you can pull up in the grocery store, and a meal plan to plan exactly what you’re going to eat.

Here’s how I recommend using this for meal planning, step-by-step:

• Update your kitchen inventory to reflect what you have in your kitchen right now. This will take some legwork the first time, but is easy to maintain after that.
• Use the recipe generator to suggest meals with what you have on hand. Use these in your meal plan.
• Fill in the gaps in your meal plan to cover breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Include leftover nights, or if that’s unappealing to you then rebrand it to “prepped meal” nights or “smorgasboard” nights. Additionally, leave space in your plan to freestyle with whatever uncooked ingredients are left. I typically plan 4-5 nights of cooking, one night of a snack dinner with a movie, and 1-2 nights of using up whatever’s left in the kitchen, whether it’s already cooked or an ingredient. You can also build in efficiencies, like having the same side dishes with different main dishes. 
• Add ingredients to your shopping list and then head to the store.

Here’s a walkthrough of how the meal planner template works: 

You can grab your copy of the template here.

While I know Notion is more familiar to many of you, I also want to let you know this template is available in Coda.io, which is similar to Notion in many ways but with more automations.

What cooking inspiration have you gotten from a recipe generator?