Use Claude to remember family recipe ratings

Chandrika Srivastava wanted weekly meals chosen from recipes her family already knew, with preferences remembered between planning sessions. She downloaded three collections from Google Docs as Markdown files and placed them in a local folder for Claude Code.

The initial plan selected five or six recipes, with one nonvegetarian dish and the rest vegetarian. Srivastava refined the choices through conversation, including a rule against multiple lentil dishes or multiple salads in the same week. Claude saved the accepted plan as a local file, which she named weekly-meal-plan.md, and turned the accumulated rules into CLAUDE.md.

A second problem was remembering the children's reactions. She asked Claude to create a skill that collected separate adult and child ratings. The resulting /rating interaction asked for recipe names and the two scores, then found each recipe's row in the weekly plan and added the ratings. AskUserQuestion made the process interactive so entries were not silently skipped.

Srivastava continued accepting proposed plans and supplying household feedback. The result was a small system of recipes, persistent selection rules and recorded reactions. She describes it as useful already, without reporting a quantified nutrition improvement, lower grocery bill or an unattended cooking routine.

Prompt
Original prompt

Source: chandrikasrivastava.substack.com · Chandrika Srivastava