Plan a full week of family dinners and a shopping list with ChatRTX

Make a "family brief" file

Open File Explorer and create a new folder somewhere easy to find, like Documents\ChatRTX-Family. Inside it, create a plain text file named family-brief.txt (right-click → New → Text Document). Open it in Notepad and type a few short lines about your household — who's eating, any allergies, which nights are tight on time, ingredients you want to use up. Save the file and close Notepad. If Notepad is not your thing, any app that saves a .txt or .docx works (Word, Google Docs exported as .docx, even Apple's Pages can export plain text).

Family of 4: two adults, two kids (ages 7 and 10). One adult is lactose intolerant. Busy nights: Tuesday and Thursday (under 30 minutes please). We love chicken, pasta, and stir-fries. Please avoid: mushrooms, very spicy food.

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Drop your recipes into the same folder

Copy or save any recipe files you have into that same ChatRTX-Family folder. PDFs of cookbooks, text files you typed yourself, exported Google Docs — anything ChatRTX can read. If you have no digital recipes yet, write three or four in plain Notepad now (one recipe per file works great). Even a few real recipes give the assistant something to mix and match; without any, it has nothing to pull from. If your recipes are scattered, just copy the same recipes in twice — duplicate recipes are fine; ChatRTX will simply notice the overlap.

Lemon chicken tray bake. Serves 4. Chicken thighs 800g, lemons 2, potatoes 600g, olive oil, salt, pepper. Bake 45 min at 200C. Squeeze lemon over at the end.

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Launch ChatRTX and load your folder

Open the ChatRTX app from your Start menu. The first launch takes a minute or two while the AI model loads into your GPU's memory (the dedicated video memory on your graphics card — bigger is faster). Once the chat window appears, look for a sidebar or a button labeled something like "Add Dataset", "Add Files", or a small folder/document icon — usually on the left side or near the top. Click it, browse to Documents\ChatRTX-Family, and select the whole folder. ChatRTX will scan your files; a small progress bar or spinner appears while it reads them. Once it finishes, the folder name usually shows up in a list of "datasets" in the sidebar.

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Ask for the 7-day plan

Click into the chat box at the bottom of the window and type a clear, single request that names your files and what you want. Press Enter (or click the send/paper-plane icon). The assistant reads your family-brief.txt and your recipes, then drafts a Monday-to-Sunday dinner plan that respects your busy nights and dietary notes. The reply usually takes 10–30 seconds depending on your GPU. If the plan ignores the lactose-free rule, your prompt was probably too vague — make the constraint explicit (see the example). If the assistant seems to invent recipes not in your folder, that's a sign the brief was unclear; tell it "only use recipes from the loaded folder."

Using the family-brief.txt and the recipes in this folder, plan dinners for Monday through Sunday. Respect the busy-night rules and the lactose-free need. Only use recipes that already exist in the folder — don't invent new ones.

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Ask for the shopping list

In the same chat, send a follow-up message asking for one consolidated shopping list. Be explicit about how you want it grouped — ChatRTX doesn't know your local store's aisle layout, so tell it the categories you care about. The assistant reads the seven recipes it just suggested and totals the ingredients, so the list stays accurate to the plan. If you changed a dinner in Step 4, re-send the list request so it re-totals. If you want quantities in cups or grams, say so — the assistant can switch units on request.

Great. Now make one shopping list with every ingredient from those 7 dinners, combined and de-duplicated. Group items by store section: produce, meat/seafood, dairy/dairy-free, pantry, frozen. List quantities in grams and milliliters where it makes sense.

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Save, print, or copy the plan

Highlight the assistant's reply, copy it with Ctrl+C, and paste it into Notepad, Word, Google Docs, or your phone's notes app for safekeeping. You can also just take a phone photo of the screen — quick and good enough for a shopping trip. If you want to reuse it next week, save the file as week-1-meal-plan.txt in your ChatRTX-Family folder; ChatRTX can read it next time and avoid repeating the same dinners. If something doesn't sound tasty to the family, reply with "swap Wednesday's dinner for something with salmon" and the assistant will suggest a replacement from your folder — or admit no salmon recipe exists.