How I Finally Stopped Overthinking What to Cook
Story By Carter Barczak
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 3 (May/June 2026)
It’s 7:15 p.m. and I can feel the drop — that end-of-day wall where every last bit of mental energy has been spent on meetings and emails, and deciding what to cook feels like being handed one more task. I had planned to stop at the grocery store on my way home. Reader, I did not stop at the grocery store.
Once I was home, I stood in front of the open fridge hoping something would jump out at me. There was food in there — steak from earlier in the week, tortillas, a few avocados, some sauces doing their best in the door — but none of it was connecting into a plan. The pantry wasn’t more helpful. My girlfriend Sophia was on her way over after her own long day, and delivery felt like defeat, and going out felt worse.
Normally this is where I’d fall into the scroll. Instagram, TikTok, the usual — there’s genuinely good food content out there, but twenty minutes later I’ve watched three unrelated videos and completely forgotten why I picked up my phone. Google isn’t better; “easy steak dinner” returns ten versions of the same recipe using ingredients I don’t have. The hunt for dinner becomes more work than the actual cooking, and most nights I just give up and order a burger. The quesadilla never gets made.
“AI didn’t cook dinner — it just got me out of my own head and into the kitchen.”
This time I did something different. I took a photo of my fridge, then my pantry, and dropped both into ChatGPT with something like “what can I make with this?” Within seconds I had ten meal ideas. One was steak quesadillas with guacamole. Immediately, that was it — it used exactly what I had, wasn’t trying to be complicated, and most importantly, it just sounded good.
I sliced the steak, got it in a pan, and started mashing avocados while the cheese melted. Twenty minutes later, dinner was on the table when Sophia walked through the door — actual dinner for two, with guac, not sad reheated leftovers. Ten minutes before that I’d had absolutely no plan. That shift happened because I stopped scrolling and started cooking. The AI didn’t make the meal. It just got me out of my own head and into the kitchen.
That win opened a door. I’m a big foodie living in Charleston, which has no shortage of great restaurants, but it’s easy to cycle through the same ten spots. I started asking ChatGPT to recommend places based on exactly what I was craving — the specific vibe, the occasion, the mood — and it started pointing me toward spots I’d never heard of. I was actually discovering new food again.
Then came the moment that really sealed it. Sophia is allergic to seafood and nuts, which makes eating out more complicated than it sounds. At any new restaurant, we spend the first several minutes going through the menu line by line, asking the server how things are made — we don’t want to make a production of it, but there’s no way around it. One night at Post House, I just took a photo of the menu and ran it through ChatGPT. In under a minute, I knew exactly what was safe and what wasn’t. No hold-up, no awkward back-and-forth. She just got to eat. That’s not a small thing.
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