This week's dinners and the shopping list, from one fridge photo (the MEALS setup)

This is the setup from the reel. "What's for dinner" gets asked every evening, usually by someone who's already hungry, and the answer is usually whatever's quickest, not whatever's about to go bad. This is the Sunday version: one photo of the fridge, one prompt, and you get a first draft of the week's dinners and the shopping list to fix up.

What you need

• One photo of the inside of your fridge, door open, shelves and the vegetable tray in frame. Pull the tray out if the good stuff hides in there.
• The free ChatGPT app on your phone. Claude and Gemini work too; all three take a photo from the paperclip or the camera button.

The prompt

Attach the photo, tap copy on the box below, change the two things in square brackets, send.

This is a photo of my fridge. Plan dinners for the next 7 days, Monday to Sunday, for [how many people], Indian home cooking, [vegetarian / vegetarian plus eggs / non-veg].

1. Use what you can see in the photo first, and cook the things that spoil fastest early in the week.
2. Keep it to what a normal home kitchen can make on a weeknight.
3. Then give me ONE shopping list for everything the week needs that isn't in the photo, grouped as sabzi, kirana and dairy, with rough quantities, written so I can paste it straight into WhatsApp.
4. If you can't tell what something in the photo is, list it under "not sure" instead of guessing.

Step 4 is the one that matters. On my run it put two juice bottles it couldn't read under "not sure", and the stuff hidden behind a carton too, instead of planning dinners around guesses.

What it gets wrong

It only sees the fridge. On my run it put salt, cooking oil, mustard seeds, cumin and five masalas on the shopping list, because a fridge photo can't show the shelf where those live. Almost every Indian kitchen already has them. So send one more line after it answers: "I already have salt, oil and all the basic masalas, take those off the list."

It ignores some of what it sees. There were limes in the photo, and the list still asked for 4 lemons.

It lists things nothing uses. Poha was on the list, and none of the seven dinners was poha. Read the list against the dinners once before you forward it.

It doesn't follow its own plan. It said it would cook the spinach and tomatoes early in the week, then put spinach on Thursday and tomatoes on Saturday. Spinach is usually the first thing in the fridge to go, so if you see it late in the week, swap that day with an earlier one.

And it doesn't know what's fresh, or what your kirana charges. The spinach might be two days from going limp and the photo won't show that; prices aren't in it at all. You still decide.

The measured run

This was not my fridge, so you know what you're reading. I ran it on a sample: a free photo of a fridge from Wikimedia Commons (public domain, the photo is here) with brinjal, spinach, carrots, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, eggs, limes and oranges in it. The household was made up too: 4 people, vegetarian plus eggs. One run, timed, on 1 October 2026. Not on the phone app: I sent the exact prompt above through OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna from the Codex command line on my desktop, and the time includes the tool starting up. In the app, add however long your photo takes to upload.

• Time: 27 seconds from send to the last line of the list
• Dinners: 7. It said the spinach and tomatoes went early and the carrots and brinjal later; the plan below puts spinach on Monday and again on Thursday
• Shopping list: 22 lines, grouped sabzi, kirana and dairy (about 26 things, because one line was five masalas)
• Not sure: it flagged two juice bottles it couldn't read, and said whatever was hidden behind the carton wasn't counted. That's step 4 doing its job
• Wrong: the four things above, the cupboard basics, the lemons, the poha and the spinach on Thursday

The week it planned, word for word apart from punctuation:

• Monday: spinach and tomato egg curry with rice
• Tuesday: carrot, spinach and egg fried rice
• Wednesday: baingan tomato sabzi, dal and roti
• Thursday: paneer and spinach curry with rice
• Friday: carrot, peas and potato pulao with raita
• Saturday: tomato egg bhurji, roti and cucumber salad
• Sunday: mixed vegetable sambar with rice; finish the citrus fruit for dessert

By hand: not timed. I'm not going to guess a number for you. Next Sunday, time yourself once, then time this.

Where the longer version lives

The Rabbit Hole is the community where I post the setups, the ones that worked and the ones that didn't. Ask there and I answer in the open, so the next person with your question finds it. New members get a 7-day free trial, then it's $5 a month for every course in the library; Premium ($99 a month) adds weekly office hours. skool.com/the-rabbit-hole-3206