A camping meal planner that knows what gear you packed

Where it stands

The Camp Cook is a personal project: a single-page web app built for camping trips. There is no client and no usage number to report. We include it because it is a clean example of a small business problem in disguise. Take a few inputs, apply rules someone already knows by heart, and produce the lists people actually work from.

The problem

Planning food for a camping trip is spreadsheet work that nobody does in a spreadsheet. How many tortillas for four people over three days. Whether taco night on day three will still be safe once the ice melts. Whether anything you packed can actually cook pancakes.

What we built

• A menu grid. Days across the top, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack down the side. Pick from 27 built-in recipes, or let it fill the empty slots. The fill avoids repeats and puts perishable meals early in the trip.
• Cooking that matches your gear. Tell it what you are bringing: a camp stove, a flat-top griddle, a Jetboil, a campfire. Every recipe knows its natural method and its alternatives, so pancakes show as a griddle meal if you packed one and a stove meal if you did not. Anything you cannot cook with the gear you selected is flagged in red.
• A shopping list that builds itself. Quantities are stored per person, scaled to the group, combined across meals, and sorted by store section, from produce to canned goods.
• The lists people forget. A gear list worked out from the menu, down to fuel, a spatula, heavy-duty foil, and roasting sticks. And a do-at-home list, like browning the taco meat and freezing it flat so it doubles as an ice pack.
• Warnings a friend would give you. Perishable meals scheduled after the ice is likely gone get an ice-risk flag. Plans that lean on the campfire get a reminder to check fire restrictions.
• Any other dish, on request. Type a dish that is not in the book, and Claude writes a campsite version with per-person quantities, a cooking method matched to the gear you selected, and short steps. It comes back as structured data, so it flows into the shopping list like any built-in recipe.

Why it matters for your business

Swap recipes for services and gear for equipment, and this is a quoting tool. A contractor’s estimate, a caterer’s order sheet, a shop’s parts list: a few inputs, the rules the owner already carries in their head, and lists that come out right every time. The AI is the smallest piece. The rules are what make it useful.