Every night I take a picture of the fridge and let ChatGPT decide what I eat

We’ve all been there – standing in front of the open fridge wondering what the hell to do with all those leftovers or ‘I haven’t been to the store in a week’ ingredients.

Yeah, that’s me most nights of the week. Life is busy and even though I usually love to cook, I usually get tired at the end of the day and all I want is to not have to decide what to do. Fortunately, a clever solution allows someone or something else to decide for me: ChatGPT.

Photography as inspiration

Using a friend’s advice and the idea of ​​using AI as a recipe generator, I decided to take a picture of my fridge and put it into ChatGPT using the new image upload and analysis option. It takes whatever I have on hand, plugs it into its internal algorithms, and spits out a series of recipes it thinks I can achieve with the contents of my fridge.

Fortunately, the process itself is simple. You open the fridge or pantry and take a picture of what you have on hand. Try to make specific ingredients or items visible, so if you can’t see all the vegetables in your drawer, you might want to open it to get a better picture. Then upload it to ChatGPT and let it do its “magic”.

Good and Ugly Food Ideas ChatGPT

The results were interesting to say the least. I will say that putting in pictures alone brought the craziest ideas, but adding a few descriptions of what I still had on hand, like frozen beef and spices, helped narrow down and refine the recipes.

Some of ChatGPT’s better ideas included a great-looking cheeseburger tater tot casserole (complete with homemade cheese sauce), a sausage and egg breakfast burrito, and a mac and cheese cheeseburger.

Funnily enough, each of the above recipes used cheese slices that ChatGPT could find in the bottom drawer of my fridge, as well as milk, butter and ketchup. So it’s obvious that he’s drawing on the more prominent and common ingredients in the pictures.

On the other hand, there were also some really… weird recipes. Recipes that clearly come from something that was never properly cooked, which is what you can expect from an AI algorithm? These recipes included Sausage and Cheese Pizza Toast, in which I would spread tomato sauce or ketchup on the toast and put slices of cheese (again) and sausage, as well as Beef Cheese and Cucumber Tacos.

Yes, you read that right. Beef tacos. With cucumbers. This recipe would have me roast ground beef with taco seasoning, heat up either tortillas or bread, and make tacos…out of the bread. Top with chopped pickle and a drop of mustard or ketchup and chopped cucumbers. I don’t know about you, but tacos, mustard and pickles really don’t make sense to me.

ChatGPT recipe winner

Luckily, ChatGPT did come through with one big winner in the form of a cheeseburger and potato soup, and that’s the one I decided to run with. It took inspiration from my fridge and pantry and a bit of direction I added to come up with a surprisingly good recipe using what I had on hand, namely a few leftover potatoes that hadn’t yet been turned into fries, a pound of hamburger meat and some other vegetables.

Made with pretty much whatever I had on hand, this dish would not have been something I came up with on my own. I wouldn’t even look for it directly, but I have to admit that it turned out really well. I followed the recipe and ended up with a delicious soup that the whole family loved.

Using ChatGPT to plan meals is fun

In my opinion, ChatGPT is a fun and easy way to come up with something quick and easy to make with ingredients straight from your fridge or pantry, especially if your biggest hang-up is deciding on “something” rather than choosing something gourmet. I recommend supplementing the pictures you put in it with some additional notes about things you may have on hand that he hasn’t seen, such as adding what kinds of proteins or spices you have.

Also, don’t forget to add what you don’t want to use. ChatGPT can now reason, but you still need to help it with your own preferences. Example: I like cheese slices, but not when they’re in every recipe! Or, if you don’t want to combine taco seasoning with pickles, you can also avoid that.

My biggest problem is that ChatGPT is not very intuitive. It comes with basic ideas that you’ll need to expand and refine, so if you don’t have time for that, it might be better to throw the food around or go with something you already know. Still, if you have the time, there’s no harm in trying to come up with something new and unique. The recipes are usually easy to follow and you can easily mix, match and tweak them to come up with something worth trying!