The Fill-in-the-Blank Prompt That Plans Your Whole Week of Meals

This is one prompt with six blanks in it. You fill them in once, paste it into ChatGPT, and get seven dinners back with a rough time against each one. It runs on the free tier, it takes about 15 minutes including the arguing, and once it’s filled in you paste the same thing every Sunday.

Below is the prompt, then the part most prompt guides skip: what each line is actually doing, so you can change it when your week stops looking like the week you described.

It’s the workhorse version of the method in our complete AI meal planning system. That page walks the whole loop from deciding to shopping. This one is about the prompt itself.

The prompt

Copy it with the brackets still in. They’re instructions to the model as much as they are to you, and it reads them as one.

That’s the whole thing. If you only came for the prompt, you have it, and the rest of this page is about making it survive contact with a real week.

The five parts, and why the order matters

Every prompt that works for a recurring job has the same five parts in the same order. Once you can see them here, you can write your own for anything — the shopping list, the school lunches, the Christmas food.

One: who is eating

The first three lines — people, nights, time — are context, and they go first because everything after them is interpreted through them. A model given “four people, five nights, 30 minutes” writes a different week from one given “two people, three nights, an hour”, before you’ve asked for anything.

The one people get wrong is nights I actually cook. Most of us type seven because there are seven days. You then get seven dinners, two of which are for evenings you were never going to cook on, and the plan feels like a failure by Wednesday when it was only ever wrong by two.

Two: what’s in the way

We do not eat and budget are the constraints. They’re separate from the context because they’re the lines you’ll edit most often, and keeping them together means you can find them.

Be specific and be slightly unkind. “Nothing with fish” is more useful than “we’re not big on fish”. “Nobody eats mushrooms and one of us will pick out onion” is better than either. The model can’t tell which of your preferences are load-bearing unless you say so.

How well this works is worth seeing. On one free-tier run the constraint was the six-year-old won’t eat anything mixed together — a shape, not a food. All five dinners came back with a note on how to keep the components apart: the sauce served separately, the omelette and toast kept separate, the potato and egg easy to keep separate for the child. Not one of them needed asking twice.

That’s the difference a specific constraint makes. “Fussy eater” would have got you nothing. Naming the actual shape of the problem got it applied to every line of the week.

Three: what you want back

This is the part most people leave out, and it’s the difference between a usable list and four paragraphs of enthusiasm.

One line each: the meal, roughly how long it takes, and one sentence on why it fits. Three fields, named. Without that you get recipes, and you didn’t ask for recipes — you asked what’s for dinner.

The four numbered rules underneath it are doing specific jobs:

• Two dinners need a faster version. Every week has at least two evenings that fall apart, and this is what stops the plan collapsing when they do. It asks for a shortcut rather than a fast meal on purpose — see below, because that change came out of watching this rule fail three times.
• No main protein twice. Without it you get chicken four times, because chicken is the statistically safe answer to almost every dinner question. Chicken twice is two chickens sounds like a joke and isn’t — “main ingredient” on its own is vague enough to argue with.
• Nothing that needs a special shop. This is the money line. Left out, you get a week that assumes gochujang and pomegranate molasses are things you own.
• Nothing on the do-not-eat line. Repeated down here even though you already said it above, because a constraint stated once at the top gets weighted like a preference.

Numbering them matters more than it looks. Rules written as flowing sentences get read as suggestions; rules written as a numbered list get read as a list of things to satisfy — and the next part is what makes that difference bite.

Four: make it check its own work

Before you reply, check your list against rules 1 to 4 and fix anything that fails.

One sentence, and it’s in the prompt because of what happened without it.

The first version of this prompt didn’t have it. Run on the free tier with the rules written as ordinary sentences, it came back in exactly the right format, with no special-shop ingredients, and it stopped before the shopping list like it was told. It also broke two of its own rules: only one dinner came in under 20 minutes instead of two, and chicken turned up twice.

Nothing was wrong with the rules. They were at the end of a long message, phrased as prose, with nothing asking whether they’d been followed. Numbering them and adding one line that makes the model read its own answer back fixed the repeated protein immediately — the next run came back with five different ones, no prompting.

The rule that never passed, and what we did about it

The self-check didn’t fix everything, and the honest version of this page says so.

The original rule was at least two dinners take under 20 minutes. It failed three runs out of three. Numbering it didn’t help. Closing the loophole — under, not exactly 20 — didn’t help. Giving it permission to say the rule was impossible didn’t help either; it just quietly returned 30, 30, 30, 30 and one that said 15 to 20.

At which point the rule was the problem, not the model. Four people, a tight budget, a child who needs everything kept separate and a real evening’s cooking — genuinely fast dinners are hard under that load, and it was choosing realism over obedience. Which is arguably the right call.

So the rule changed to something achievable, and better: two of the dinners need a faster version — tell me what to skip to get each under 20 minutes. Almost any 30-minute meal has a 20-minute version if you drop a step, and what you actually wanted was never two fast dinners. It was knowing what to do on Tuesday when the evening falls apart.

The next run passed on all four rules, first try. Two dinners came back with a shortcut attached — skip the peas and carrots and make simple egg-and-rice in about 10 minutes, and skip peeling and chopping the potatoes and use chickpeas with rice only, bringing it under 20 minutes. Five different proteins across five nights. Nothing needing a special shop. Every line noting how to keep the six-year-old’s food separate.

It also volunteered the phrase without repeating any main protein in one of its own descriptions, which is the self-check line showing its working.

If a prompt keeps missing the same instruction, that’s usually the instruction asking for something the situation cannot give. Rewrite what you asked for before you rewrite how you asked.

Five: where to stop

Then stop. I will tell you which ones to swap before you write the shopping list.

Almost nobody writes this line and it’s the most useful one in the prompt.

Left to itself the model will hand you the plan and the shopping list in one go, which sounds efficient and isn’t. You haven’t approved the plan yet. Two of those dinners are wrong, and now the list has ingredients on it for meals you’re about to delete — so you either shop for food you won’t cook, or you ask for the list again and read the whole thing twice.

Making it stop costs one sentence and saves that entire round trip. The same sentence, plus one more, is what stops week two arriving identical to week one.

Filling in the blanks when your week is a mess

The brackets look like they want tidy answers. They don’t. Here’s what three real households put in them.

Four people, one of whom is six

People: 2 adults, 2 children (6 and 11)
Nights I actually cook: 5 — Monday to Thursday and Sunday
Time on a normal night: 30 minutes, less on Tuesday
We do not eat: no fish, the six-year-old won’t eat anything mixed together
Already in the cupboard: half a bag of spinach, mince in the freezer, a lot of pasta
Budget: tight

“Won’t eat anything mixed together” is the line doing the work there. It’s not a food, it’s a shape, and naming the shape gets you meals built from separate components instead of a casserole with a negotiation attached.

Two people, both working late

People: 2 adults
Nights I actually cook: 3, and I don’t know which ones until the day
Time on a normal night: 20 minutes
We do not eat: nothing off-limits, but we’re bored of chicken
Already in the cupboard: rice, tinned tomatoes, eggs
Budget: normal

“I don’t know which ones until the day” is worth typing exactly like that. It stops the model assigning meals to weekdays, which is the assumption that makes a plan feel like a schedule you’re failing.

One person who is tired of deciding

People: 1
Nights I actually cook: 4
Time on a normal night: 25 minutes
We do not eat: nothing, but I won’t cook two things in one evening
Already in the cupboard: whatever’s left, ask me
Budget: normal

Ask me is a legitimate answer. It’ll come back with a question instead of a plan, you answer it in six words, and the week it writes is built around what you actually have. That’s a fair trade for one extra message.

When the first pass comes back wrong

It will. That’s the job — the first pass is something to react to, not something to cook. Three corrections cover nearly all of it, and you say them in one message rather than three.

It ignored a constraint

Usually the last one you typed. Repeat it on its own line and add this one is not optional. Constraints buried mid-paragraph get weighted like preferences; constraints on their own line get treated as rules.

Everything takes longer than it says

The times are optimistic and always will be — they’re the time the cooking takes, not the time the evening takes. Add ten minutes to whatever it says, or tell it assume I am interrupted twice, which is funnier and works about as well.

It’s technically right and nobody wants it

The hardest one to describe and the easiest to fix. Say too worthy, make three of them the kind of thing people are actually pleased to see. It knows exactly what you mean, which is either reassuring or not depending on your mood.

What it gave us

Run on the free tier with all six blanks filled. Every rule held on the first attempt: two dinners with a named shortcut, five different main proteins across five nights, nothing needing a special shop, no fish, and one dinner per cooking night rather than one per day.

It also volunteered the phrase without repeating any main protein inside one of its own descriptions — the self-check line, showing its working.

Three variations worth keeping

Same four parts, one line changed. Keep them in the same note as the main prompt.

• The empty-fridge week. Replace Already in the cupboard with a full list of what’s actually there and add build as much of the week as possible from this before adding anything. Best version of the prompt, and the one that saves the most money.
• The one-cooking-session week. Add arrange it so most of the cooking happens in one session and the rest is assembly. It restructures the whole week rather than just reordering it.
• The nothing-new week. Add only meals from this list and paste the dinners your household already eats. No discovery, no risk, five minutes.

That last one sounds like giving up and isn’t. Most weeks don’t need a new idea. They need the deciding to be over. Taken far enough, that becomes a two-week rotation you stop rewriting altogether.