[simonw]

I've been cooking with the help of LLMs a few times a month for over a year now. It's worked out well 9/10 times.

It turns out the "average" version of a recipe that's baked into the weights is usually a solid recipe, and they're really good at offering substitutions for things like "I don't have ingredient X" or "make it vegetarian".

It's also fun promoting "make it tastier" once or twice after each recipe just to see what happens.

[cloakandswagger]

One of the most satisfying and useful applications for AI is handing it the URL for a recipe (replete with 8 paragraphs of useless introductory text, 2 paragraphs dedicated to how to refrigerate the meal, 9 inline advertisements and a mid-scroll ad) and having it return the actual recipe in Markdown in an Obsidian folder.

[NoboruWataya]

Surprisingly, a lot of these recipe websites (even the worst offenders for fluff and ads) have a clean JSON API for getting the recipe directly. I self-host a Mealie instance (https://docs.mealie.io/) which has an "import from URL" feature that uses this. It has rarely if ever failed me.

[fwip]

You can also hit "print" and get a nicely formatted, single page list of ingredients and recipe.

[enobrev]

I've been maintaining a personal calorie tracker (keeps me entering), and using claude for entering meals has been the perfect experience.

One of my favorite features has been giving a recipe url and having it figure out the calories for that recipe with line-by-line entries for each ingredient. Then it keeps the extracted recipe in markdown format for the next time I want to make it.

Substitutions are also great - "I'm making [such and such recipe], but with half the sugar."

One of the others has been "I had a meal a couple weeks ago at [x restaurant], can you enter that again for right now?" Having the long-term context for entry has been excellent. And a related one, where I upload a photo of the menu, and say which menu items I'm eating and it puts together an estimate for the calorie count.

I lean heavily on a long auto-compacting claude code session for all of this. I have a UI for graphs, history, and simple entries, but claude's been my favorite means of entry by far

[simonw]

The other day I did that with a TikTok video! It was infuriatingly vague, so I extracted the mp4 using yt-dlp and fed the video file into Gemini Flash and told it to fill in the missing information and give me back a proper recipe.

[zahlman]

Okay, but I think we all want to hear the story about the time it failed.

[simonw]

The other day I was making a white bean shakshuka, I'd soaked the beans over night, I told it they were soaked, Claude said I should cook them with onions and eggs... but forgot to tell me to cook the beans!

We resolved the issue and Claude chirpily commented "So breakfast just became brunch".

[retnull]

This seems quite dangerous as undercooked beans can cause food poisoning or even be fatal.

[simonw]

Yeah, Claude told me that too.