meals_skill

Overview

This skill builds a personal meal-planning system that creates weekly plans, generates shopping lists, and tracks what actually works for you. It stores plans and recipes under ~/meals/ so your meals, preferences, and shopping history grow into a useful personal database. The focus is on practical, repeatable cooking—quick weeknights, batch prep, and gradual improvement over time.

How this skill works

When you plan a week it asks how many meals to schedule, who’s eating, and which nights are busy. It generates a shopping list by aggregating ingredients from planned meals, combining quantities, grouping items by store section, and subtracting pantry staples. After cooking you rate meals and record prep times, servings, dietary tags and notes so future plans use your actual results.

When to use it

• Planning dinners and lunches for the coming week
• Creating an aggregated, sectioned shopping list from planned recipes
• Tracking which recipes you actually cook and how they performed
• Organizing batch-cook or prep-ahead sessions
• Adjusting plans for dietary restrictions or family preferences

Best practices

• Start small: plan a few dinners first, then expand to lunches and weekend meals
• Record only meals you actually make, with real prep/cook times and servings
• Maintain a pantry-staples list so shopping lists exclude items you always have
• Tag meals by time and type (under 30 minutes, one-pot, freezer-friendly)
• Use simple weekly files (e.g., 2024-week-11.md) to keep plans readable and versioned

Example use cases

• Generate a shopping list that combines ingredient quantities and groups by produce, dairy, meat, and pantry
• Plan a week with busy nights marked as quick or takeout and the rest balanced for variety
• Run a Sunday batch-cook plan that shares ingredients and produces leftovers for lunches
• Save successful meals with ratings and use them to auto-suggest repeats or variations
• Track dietary constraints and dislikes to exclude unsuitable recipes automatically