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Import family recipes in any language and plan the week in Mealie with Claude

WorkedEvidence: Described by posterPosted Last checked

Claude translates family recipes into Mealie, then drafts seven dinners and seven lunches around each person's food rules.

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  1. Tap Copy prompt.
  2. Open Claude.
  3. Paste it into the message box.
  4. Send it, then read the answer before acting on it.
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What the prompt labels mean

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Using my recipe library and our household rules (no mushrooms or celery for me, no ginger or coriander for my wife, a child who is fussy about fish, pizza only at weekends), draft next week's plan: seven dinners, five weekday lunches for two and two weekend lunches. Avoid meals we've had recently, check each recipe's full ingredient list, and wait for my OK before saving.

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Optional stronger version

Our rewrite with extra checks. The poster didn't test it.

Before you start, ask me 1–3 short questions about the details below and wait for my answers. Once I've answered, confirm the plan in one line and run the whole task start to finish.

Goal: A weekly family meal plan and shopping list that respects everyone's food rules.

Questions to ask me first:
- What meals do you need planned each week?
- Which foods does each person avoid?
- Where are your recipes kept, and in what languages?

Inputs (fill in or confirm):
- Recipe source: [APP, FOLDER OR LIST]
- Food rules per person: [NAME: FOODS TO AVOID]
- Meals needed: [E.G. 7 DINNERS, 5 LUNCHES]
- Recent meals to avoid repeating: [LAST 2 WEEKS]

Rules:
- Check every recipe's full ingredient list, not just its name.
- Don't repeat a meal from the last two weeks.
- Reuse batch-cooked dishes for school lunches where possible.
- Save nothing until I approve the draft.

Checkpoint: Show the draft week as a table before building the shopping list.

If you get stuck: If a recipe's ingredients are unclear, flag it rather than guessing.

Verify before you finish: No planned meal contains a food on anyone's avoid list.

Output: A week-by-day plan and a shopping list merged into pack sizes and grouped by aisle.

Done when: The plan is approved and the shopping list is ready to use.

AI tool

Claude

Outcome

David Robinson runs Mealie, a self-hosted recipe manager, but keeping it filled was a chore: many family recipes were in Spanish, Robinson's wife's native language, and others were handwritten notes, WhatsApp messages, photos and transcribed cooking videos. Robinson built a custom MCP server that lets Claude use Mealie's API, plus a project skill holding the household rules (no mushrooms or celery for one adult, no ginger or coriander for the other, a child who is fussy about fish, the pizza oven only at weekends, and batch cooking for school lunches). Claude now translates recipes in any language, restructures them, checks for duplicates and writes them into Mealie with no manual entry. For weekly planning it reads recent meal history so meals don't repeat too soon, checks every candidate recipe's full ingredient list against the rules, and drafts seven dinners, five weekday lunches and two weekend lunches. Nothing is written until Robinson confirms the draft; then Claude adds the plan, merges ingredients into pack sizes and groups the shopping list by aisle, which appears on the family's wall display through Home Assistant.

Evidence: Described by posterThe person describes what happened in words, without screenshots or video.

Source

Posted
by David Robinson (The Rundown community)
Last checked
Method:
How we verify

https://app.therundown.ai/community/posts/ca33fa2c-d3b8-4628-a409-afecdfaa7ba1

Context: Posted to The Rundown community (date from the post's UTC timestamp). The setup needs a self-hosted Mealie server and a custom MCP connector the author built; the prompt here covers only the weekly planning step.

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