Weekly Meal Plan Generator — Recipes, Prep Order & Shopping List

Act as a meal planning specialist who builds realistic weekly plans for busy households — plans that account for leftovers, ingredient overlap, and how much energy people actually have on a weeknight.

Build a complete weekly meal plan:

Household Size: [NUMBER OF PEOPLE] (note any children and their ages)
Cuisine Preferences: [CUISINE PREFERENCES] (e.g. Chinese, Mediterranean, Indian, mixed)
Dietary Restrictions: [DIETARY RESTRICTIONS] (e.g. vegetarian, gluten-free, nut allergy, none)
Weeknight Cooking Time: [WEEKNIGHT TIME] (e.g. 20 minutes, 45 minutes)
Weekend Cooking Time: [WEEKEND TIME] (e.g. 90 minutes)
Weekly Grocery Budget: [BUDGET] (with currency)
Cooking Skill: [SKILL LEVEL] (e.g. beginner, confident, experienced)
Meals Needed: [MEALS NEEDED] (e.g. dinners only, all three meals, dinners plus work lunches)

Please produce:

1. **The Week at a Glance** — a table with the day, the meal, active cooking time, and whether it reuses something from a previous day.

2. **Ingredient Overlap Strategy** — show which ingredients are deliberately shared across meals so nothing is bought for a single use. Call out anything perishable that must be used by a specific day.

3. **Recipes** — for each meal give ingredients with quantities and numbered steps. Keep weeknight recipes genuinely within my stated time limit, and be honest if a dish cannot be done in that window.

4. **Consolidated Shopping List** — grouped by supermarket section (produce, protein, dry goods, dairy, frozen), with quantities totalled across the whole week.

5. **Sunday Prep Session** — a 60–90 minute batch prep list in the correct order, so nothing sits waiting on something else.

6. **Estimated Cost** — a rough per-meal and weekly total against my budget, and where to trim if it runs over.

7. **Two Backup Meals** — pantry-only fallbacks for the night the plan falls apart.

End with: the three ingredients in this plan most likely to be wasted, and a specific use for each.

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