Cooking With Claude
Learning to Practice Life in Small, Delicious Pieces
What started out as a way for me to learn how to use Claude Code to get more done as a software developer ended up becoming something bigger: a little ecosystem of recipes, workflows, notes, and learnings from everything I’ve tried.
Cooking With Claude 👉 https://github.com/dmorrill/cooking-with-claude
This fall, I started using Claude Code in my kitchen as a cooking companion. I still use ChatGPT to help me with ingredient sourcing, ideation, and research when I’m on the go… but when it comes time to actually make a plan for the week’s meals, organize and refine recipes, and update household inventory I’ve found git repos to be the kind of memory management I prefer.
What’s in Cooking with Claude
Over three months, I’ve accumulated:
40+ recipes rewritten in my voice, with Denver altitude adjustments
Inventory tracking across seven locations in our house (because nothing is simple)
Prep-and-assemble workflows that let me cook while my husband preps
Notes on what actually worked, not what sounded good
The version I published removes all the personal details — Kevin’s email from the calendar invitations, our Denver market research, the 100+ items actually in my pantry. But the structure is there, and I’ve captured the patterns that work. It’s not a recipe app. It’s a system for knowing what you can actually cook right now with what you already have.
The Thanksgiving Test
The real test for this system came in late November, when recipes I’d been testing and others I was ambitious enough to try started to come together into my Thanksgiving meal plan. Despite planning a the meal for just my husband and I, the menu included a cocktail, cake, and 5 dishes for two people.
Claude helped me break it into a four-day prep schedule. What to make Monday (vegetable broth, mostly hands-off simmering). What to bake Tuesday (cake layers, mushroom ragù). What to assemble Wednesday. What to save for Thursday morning so the rolls would be fresh.
That’s when I knew it was real — not the AI part, but the competence part. I had practiced enough small things (chopping, timing, planning, adjusting for altitude) that I could hold a complex meal together without losing myself in the logistics.
Try It Yourself
If you want to see what happens when an AI coding assistant steps into your kitchen, the repo is here:
👉 https://github.com/dmorrill/cooking-with-claude
You can start small. Just clone the repo, open Claude Code, and tell it you want to cook a recipe — one of mine, or something you paste in. You can even ask Claude what you can make with whatever’s in your fridge right now.
Taste. Iterate. Make mistakes. Tell Claude how it went so you can introspect together and try again. That’s how taste is built — not through endless discourse, but by engaging with reality. That’s how competence is built — not through perfect planning, but by executing imperfectly in the face of constraints: time, money, attention, motivation, and your current skill set.
Cooking can be frustrating. We have a rule in my house that if a dish is terrible, we don’t make ourselves eat it, we toss it and go out. If it’s “meh” but edible, we don’t save the leftovers. We don’t force ourselves through it. We just write down what didn’t work so we don’t make the same mistake again.
I’m 40 now, and if I’m lucky I’ll cook more than 6,000 dinners before the end of my life. I’m happy to be practicing on purpose.
Making Invisible Work Visible
Meal planning is invisible work.
You can’t see it when it’s done well — there’s no pile of folded laundry, no sparkling bathroom to photograph. But when it’s not done, everyone feels it. The 5pm panic. The expensive takeout. The mental load of “what’s for dinner?” landing on the same person, every single day.
Working with Claude in my kitchen taught me something about coordination — not the workplace kind, but the kind that holds a day, a home, a relationship together. Cooking is just one domain where this invisible work happens.
There’s also:
Remembering when air filters need changing
Tracking which kid needs new shoes
Knowing what’s in the basement freezer versus the upstairs one
Coordinating schedules across family members
Planning for birthdays, holidays, the logistics of living
Most of this work lives in one person’s head. It’s exhausting. It can feel lonely. And it compounds.
Reflecting on My Theme for 2025
Each year, I choose a theme for myself. It started as a reading theme back when I was doing the 100-books-per-year challenge. This year, I dialed it back to 50 books so I could spend more time *doing* my hobbies instead of just intellectualizing them. My 2025 theme was Competence.
As the year unfolded this found expression in many ways, but in this post I want to reflect specifically on excellence in small repeated tasks — the tiny things we do every day that most of us rush through or postpone:
making my morning coffee
changing the sheets
walking the dogs
preparing a healthy meal
taking care of my skin, hair, nails, and teeth
I used to treat all of this as background noise, the stuff I would “catch up on” later when work slowed down (it never did). And then when startups ended or jobs changed, I’d suddenly find myself surrounded by everything I’d avoided: messes, appointments, overdue maintenance, a life that had been running on fumes.
Almost a decade ago, when my startup Mattermark sold, my life was at its most chaotic level of mess. Since then, I’ve found a different rhythm. It’s likely age, home ownership, and leaving San Francisco all helped. Even with all that, this year Cooking With Claude changed my flow of life yet again, in a quiet way.
Collaborating with Claude Code on making meals let me practice competence in prompting an LLM to help me build something without falling into the trap of what coding language, framework or market I was working on. I already had a language the recipes came in: English. I also had a market for the meals: my husband and our friends and family. Slowly, repeatedly, with low-stakes I iterated on recipes and meal planning — and capturing and questioning from the command line made those repetitions feel like craft instead of obligation.
What I’m Exploring Now
I’m not ready to share new product details yet. But I will say this:
What if that invisible work could be made visible? Shareable? What if AI could help — not by doing it for you, but by giving you the structure that makes it manageable?
If you’ve ever carried the mental load of your household and wondered why we have operating systems for business operations but not for homes, I’m figuring something out.
Maybe you’re like me and you’ve got your own systems that you’ve evolved across spreadsheets, to-do list apps, lightweight project management software like Trello, or even the command line with markdown files and LLM help!
I’ve also got repos going for gardening, investing, home maintenance, career, travel, relationships, self improvement and startup ideas… so let me know if you’d be interested in seeing open source versions of any of these.
Cooking With Claude 👉 https://github.com/dmorrill/cooking-with-claude
RE: the invisible work - I feel this hard.
I'm building an app to digitally ingest and categorize all of the paper that we get handed but that I don't want to keep.
But yes to... all of those use cases. It just grows exponentially with kids.