Planning a Week of Dinners with AI (That You Actually Want to Eat)

Meal planning is a slog. You stare at your recipe collection, think about what you've eaten lately, worry about ingredients you already have, and somehow still end up ordering pizza because you couldn't decide.

Cook's AI can help — but it's not the generic "here are ten random recipes" kind of help. It's actually useful.

Getting started: the Kickstart service

If you're new to Cook and don't have fifty recipes yet, that's okay. Use the Kickstart service — it curates fifteen top-rated recipes from the internet based on your preferences and adds them to your collection. These aren't AI-generated; they're real, well-loved recipes you can actually cook.

Once you've got a foundation, you're ready for CookBot.

How CookBot works

Open Cook Editor and chat with CookBot. Tell it what you're in the mood for, what you have on hand, or what you want to cook this week. It suggests recipes from your collection, answers questions about ingredients, and helps you plan.

Better yet, you can create a preferences file — a plain COOK.md Markdown file — that tells CookBot your dietary preferences, cooking style, and what you like. It's like a memory file for the AI. Once it understands you, every suggestion gets smarter.

Real menu planning, not random suggestions

Most recipe apps generate meal plans by picking recipes at random. CookBot understands cooking best practices — balancing techniques, flavours, meal structures, and ingredient compatibility. It knows what makes sense to cook back-to-back and what actually tastes good together.

Ask it to plan five dinners for the week using what you've already got. It'll pick recipes that don't repeat ingredients, that balance light and heavy meals, and that actually fit what you told it you wanted.

Need to use up that half-head of cabbage before it goes bad? Tell CookBot. It'll find recipes in your collection that use it.

What a meal plan actually looks like

Here's the part most apps hide from you: in Cooklang, a meal plan isn't trapped inside a database. It's a plain-text file you own — a .menu file — that lives right alongside your recipes. CookBot helps you build it, but you can read, edit, version, and back it up like any other text file.

A .menu file uses sections for days and references the recipes already in your collection. A real three-day plan looks like this:

---
servings: 2
---

==Day 0==

-- delivery around 4pm

Dinner: \
- @hake fillet{2}(baked) with @./Sides/Mashed Potatoes{2%servings} \
- @./Salads/Boring{2%servings}

-- do prep for burrito

==Day 1==

Breakfast: \
- @./Breakfast/Mexican Style Burrito{2%servings} \
- @filter coffee{1%cup} and @tea{1%cup}

Lunch: \
- @./Lunches/Spaghetti Bolognese{} \
- @./Salads/Boring{2%servings}

Dinner: \
- @./Salads/Caprese{2}

== Snacks ==

- @kefir{2} \
- @dates \
- @apples

== Batch Prep ==

- @./Freezable/Kotletter{}

A few things are doing real work here:

  • Recipe references like @./Breakfast/Mexican Style Burrito{2%servings} point at the actual .cook files in your collection. Change the recipe, and the plan stays in sync — no copy-paste.
  • Scaling is built in. {2%servings} reads the recipe's own serving count and scales every ingredient to feed two. {1/2} makes half a batch. Plan once for two people, regenerate for six without rewriting anything.
  • Day sections (==Day 1==) keep meals in order, and you can date them (== Day 1 (2026-03-07) ==) so apps can jump straight to today's plan.
  • Direct ingredients like @filter coffee{1%cup} cover the simple stuff that doesn't need a full recipe.
  • Comments (-- do prep for burrito) capture the timing and logistics notes you'd otherwise forget — when a delivery lands, what to prep ahead.
  • Snacks and batch prep get their own sections, so they still make it onto the shopping list.

Because it's a single file referencing your recipes, the plan naturally reuses ingredients efficiently — the same salad accompanies different mains to use up fresh greens, a stew gets made once and portioned across days. That's less prep and less waste, and you can see it at a glance.

Pro tip: start with three days

New to meal planning? Don't jump straight to a full week. Start by planning just three dinners. It's less overwhelming, you learn how the system works, and you build confidence. Once three days feels easy, scale up.

Beyond your collection: discovering new recipes

Want to try something new? Ask CookBot to search online for recipes matching what you're craving — "something with miso that's quick," or "a vegetarian lasagna." It finds options, converts them to Cooklang, and adds them to your collection. You can specify dietary preferences, cuisine, cook time, and how many recipes you want.

Shopping list that's already optimized

Because your .menu file references real recipes, Cook can read straight through it and pull every ingredient — from the recipes, from the direct items, from the snacks and batch-prep sections — into a single shopping list. Quantities are combined across meals, grouped by aisle, and organized by your store layout. You're not buying duplicates. You're not wasting food. And if you already keep a pantry list, the things you've got on hand get left off automatically.

Next steps

CookBot is available to Cook Cloud subscribers — see pricing to get started. Use the Kickstart service if you need a jump start, and see how it changes your cooking rhythm.