Plan a toddler's dinners around the kindergarten menu from Home Assistant

A Redditor's Home Assistant setup has Claude read the weekly kindergarten menu, suggest three child dinners a day that avoid lunch and recent meals, and turn missing ingredients into a shared shopping list.

Done with

Custom agent

Apps touched

Home Assistant

Discord

ReportedOct 14, 2026

What they did

u/spanzuratu runs Home Assistant in Docker with about 1,460 entities and a wall tablet in the kitchen. The kindergarten teacher sends the weekly menu as a photo on WhatsApp; the poster forwards it to a Discord channel and Claude reads it into a sensor. A script then calls Claude through Home Assistant's AI Task integration with the child's rules (30 minutes max, only chicken, turkey or fish, salmon at most every two weeks, little salt), her favourite dishes, the day's forecast, the last 15 dinners and what she ate at lunch. It returns three dinners of different types with full recipes as structured fields. Ticking missing ingredients on the tablet creates a shared Google Keep list, and a starred recipe is saved to a to-do list. A separate weekly job reads Bucharest children's theatre listings and keeps shows that fit her age and start after 10:00. The dashboard itself, about 5,300 lines of vanilla JS, was mostly written with Claude Code over two weeks.

How it went

The family uses it every day and the poster says his wife uses it as much as he does. Fresh recipes come back daily without repeating lunch or recent meals. Two things needed fixing: the structured output would not accept a list of objects, so each recipe became six flat fields, and the token limit had to be raised so all three recipes came back complete. The poster says testing and living with it takes far more time than building.

Worth knowing

The menu step still has a person in it: the photo is forwarded by hand from WhatsApp to Discord. Google Keep is not in our app list; the shopping list is created there. The poster shared the full prompt and script in the comments, and a commenter's layout advice was taken the same day.

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11 parts to fill in

Every day at [4 pm], suggest 3 dinner ideas for [my child's name], aged [age]. Rules: each takes at most [30] minutes; [my food rules, e.g. no beef or pork]; age-appropriate, little salt, nothing spicy. They like [dishes my family eats]; go in that direction but vary. Read today's lunch from [the school menu I gave you] and avoid its dishes and main ingredient. Don't repeat any of [the last 15 dinners]. If it's cold today in [my city], make at least one a warm dish. Make the three different types (one soup, one vegetable-based, one with chicken, fish or egg) and give each a full recipe for [2 child portions]. When I mark ingredients as missing, add them to [my shared shopping list] and show me the list before you share it.