Cooking With Claude, Ten Months Later

In December I open-sourced Cooking With Claude, the set of recipes, inventory files, and instructions I use to plan and cook meals with Claude Code. I kept using it most weeks. Today I shipped version 3, which brings over what changed in my own copy since then.

Most of it came from a specific meal or a specific problem. Here are the ones I use the most.

Altitude is set once

I live in Denver, at 5,280 feet. Water boils at about 202°F here instead of 212°F, so beans, grains, and pasta all take longer than the recipe says, and baked goods rise too fast and dry out.

In July I wrote my elevation into the instructions Claude reads at the start of every session, along with the rules for what changes. Boiling runs 15 to 30 percent longer. Pressure cooking needs about 5 percent more time per thousand feet above 2,000. Baking gets a hotter oven, less leavening, and a little more liquid. Roasting and searing don't change.

Now every cooking time comes back already adjusted, with a short note on why it's different from the recipe. In the public version you put in your own elevation, or delete the section if you're near sea level.

A Sunday email about the week's food

On Sunday night Claude reads the week's meal plan, checks our calendars for dinner reservations, and drafts an email to my husband with what we're eating each day. Every meal is tagged as cooking at home, delivery, or dinner out. If one of us is away a night, it says so. I read it and hit send.

The template has the format and the voice rules.

Big meals get a prep packet

For the Seahawks season opener we made chili, skillet cornbread, and jalapeño slaw. I asked Claude to turn the menu into something I could actually run, and it came back with a countdown. Place the grocery order Sunday. Soak the beans Monday night, which takes about 90 seconds. Cook Tuesday afternoon, with three and a half hours where the chili sits in the slow cooker and nobody needs to be in the kitchen. On game day the only pan to wash was the cornbread skillet.

That structure is now a template: the menu, which appliance does what, a countdown from a few days out, a timeline for cook day, and a list of what's on hand versus what to buy.

Recipes that take more than one try

I'm trying to recreate my husband's grandmother's cinnamon rolls from his memory of them. The first bake in August got the layers right and the color wrong. When he tasted them, he remembered something no recipe I'd found had mentioned: cinnamon sugar rolled onto the outside.

The recipe file now keeps a log of each attempt. What we changed, how it turned out, what he said, and what to change next. There's also a note about keeping the test honest. In the first bake I changed four things I hadn't planned to, and only one of them was on purpose. The second bake is in October.

The log format is in the repo as a template for anyone working out a recipe over several attempts.

The reason behind the food

I also wrote down why I eat the way I do: the books I learned from, what I'm working on right now, and a quick test I use for any meal. Claude reads that file before it plans a week. The public version is a blank template to fill in with your own.

Also in this release

Ten new recipes, including silky hummus, lemon clam bucatini, tomato-strawberry gazpacho, and refrigerator dill pickles
A guide to cooking dried beans at altitude
The optional MCP server for Claude Desktop can now read and edit the week's meal plan, and suggest what to do with leftovers based on what freezes well
Olive oil tracking by harvest date instead of the best-by date

The full release notes list everything. To try it, clone the repo, open Claude Code in the folder, and ask what you can make for dinner.