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The most wonderful time of the year can also be the busiest time of the year. Make this holiday season the easiest yet with a little help from technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) is ready to stir up some holiday magic in the kitchen, leaving you more time to savor the moments that matter most — good food, great company, and unforgettable memories. Here are five ways that AI can help you in the kitchen this holiday season.
Dinner is just a prompt away
While we might not yet have futuristic, humanoid robo-chefs slicing up potatoes in the kitchen, AI is more than ready to take a proactive approach to prepping holiday meals.
Microsoft offers prompt suggestions that can be used to direct a generative AI, like Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT to plan a holiday feast with friends and family. For example, feed the AI a prompt with information about the ingredients you have, the dishes you like,and the number of people you are serving, to get a detailed breakdown of timing, tips, ingredients, and instructions.
Microsoft gives specific suggestions for crafting prompts like, “I’m hosting a Christmas dinner party for eight people, and I have chicken, cranberries, and sweet potatoes in my fridge.Suggest a festive dinner menu using these ingredients, including appetizers, a main course, and a dessert.”
AI adaptations
For those who already have the menu in mind, AI can help with adapting the menu to make it diet, allergen, or vegetarian-friendly. Microsoft suggests asking the AI something like, “I’m planning a Christmas dinner for guests with gluten and dairy allergies. Create a menu with appetizers, main courses, and desserts that fit these restrictions,” to get suggestions for adaptations of traditional recipes and new, creative ideas for dishes.
Rachel Kane, a writer for CNET employed Microsoft’s Generative AI, Co-Pilot, in a similar way, using it to change recipes to remove certain ingredients and to convert measurements to cook for a larger group. Kane suggests managing the AI’s expectations from the beginning of the conversation by letting it know the budget and the chef’s level of expertise, so it won’t suggest sous vide steaks to a kitchen amateur
Spend less
Co-Pilot and other LLMs (Large Language Models) can even save money by generating a low-cost meal with an itemized price breakdown for every ingredient that is more-or-less accurate. The AI will suggest other tips for saving money on holiday meals, like waiting for sales or using canned, rather than fresh, ingredients.
AIPRM is a company that optimizes ChatGPT and helps people craft perfect prompts to get precisely what they want out of AI. In a blog, the company suggests GPT Inflation shopping and recipes, ChatGPT prompts and add-ons for saving money when shopping for food or planning recipes.
Saving the earth
AI can’t just save the green in one’s wallet, it can make the holiday season greener overall. In 2021, the Man Institute piloted using an LLM to plan an eco-friendly Christmas dinner.
They did so by feeding the AI 357 Christmas recipes from BBC Good Food. Although these recipes combined contained more than 3,000 ingredients, many were duplicates with different phrasing. The GPT was able to analyze, combine, and simplify ingredients to come up with a much smaller list of ingredients common to all the recipes.
Researchers estimated the carbon footprint of each of the ingredients and fed it to the AI, which calculated the most eco-friendly meal of all the options: a starter of sage, leek, and onion balls, a roast vegetable tray main, and gingered fruit cake for dessert.
Those dreaming of a green Christmas can ask the GPT to rank or suggest meals that are greener or sustainably produced.
Using up leftovers
LLMs can help with saving the earth after the holidays as well, suggests British rapper and chef, Big Zuu reported Verge. This is necessary because 44 percent of Brits overbuy food during the holiday season and a third don’t know what to do with the leftovers.
The top five leftovers after Christmas dinner are turkey, potatoes, vegetables, stuffing, and cheese.Big Zuu put Google Gemini to work, finding creative and tasty combos with these five ingredients. Gemini suggested things like making Turkey and Stuffing Pinwheels by spreading stuffing on turkey slices, rolling them up, and putting in toothpicks, and topping leftover roast potatoes with cheese and chives and baking them until they are golden brown. Gemini even suggested a dessert bread pudding with ice cream made from leftover cranberry sauce.
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