Farm-to-Table Software: How I Built a Thanksgiving Party Hub with Lovable & Hacked Recipes with ChatGPT

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I wanted to do something a little different. Instead of interviewing a guest, I’m taking you into my own kitchen—and my own code editor—to show you how I use AI to solve real, everyday problems. Hosting a big holiday meal can be chaotic, from tracking who’s coming and what they can eat, to coordinating dishes and trying to follow a recipe with flour-dusted hands. My solution was to build a personalized Thanksgiving party hub.

In this episode, I’m walking you through two of my favorite personal AI workflows. First, we’ll build a complete party planning app from scratch using Lovable. I’ll show you how to go from a generic, AI-generated starting point to what I like to call “farm-to-table software”—something that feels warm, personal, and artisanally crafted. We’ll use Google Fonts to improve the typography and Midjourney to create beautiful, custom visuals that generic apps just can’t match.

Then, for the second workflow, I’m sharing a kitchen hack I swear by. I’ll show you my simple prompt for turning any cluttered online recipe into a perfectly formatted, step-by-step guide using ChatGPT. It’s a trick I use all the time, especially when cooking with my kids, and it’s a perfect example of how AI can bring a little more ease and joy into our daily lives.

This is all about making AI practical, personal, and even beautiful. Grab a cup of something warm, and let's get building!

Workflow 1: Vibe Coding a 'Farm-to-Table' Thanksgiving Party Hub

My goal was to create a central place for my Thanksgiving festivities—a hub for managing invites, coordinating potluck dishes, sharing recipes, and creating a photo gallery. I wanted something more personal than a standard e-vite, so I turned to vibe coding with Lovable to build it fast.

Step 1: The Initial Prompt in Lovable

I started with a simple, direct prompt to get the basic structure in place. I just outlined the core features I knew I'd need for any big holiday gathering.

I prompted lovable to give me a Thanksgiving party hub for managing invites, dishes, shared recipes and photos.

The result was functional, but… let's just say it was a bit bland. It had a boring stock photo, the layout felt clunky, and it lacked any real personality. It was classic AI-generated slop, and I knew we could do better.

Step 2: Upleveling Typography with Google Fonts

One of the fastest ways to improve any design is with great typography. A common misconception is that these vibe coding tools are locked down, but most, including Lovable, integrate perfectly with Google Fonts.

I often turn to resources like Canva's Font Combinations page for inspiration. For this project, I wanted a cozy, handwritten feel, so I chose a pairing I loved:

• Headline Font: Homemade Apple
• Body Font: Railway

With my font pair selected, I gave Lovable a simple, direct instruction to implement them:

I want to use Google fonts. Homemade apple for the headlines and railway for the body.

Instantly, the entire feel of the app changed. It felt warmer, more personal, and unique. What’s great is that you can inspect the files in Lovable and see exactly how it works. It adds the Google Fonts API call, configures the fonts in the Tailwind CSS file, and updates the default CSS. It's a great way to learn front-end development best practices while you design.

Step 3: Designing a Custom Header with Midjourney

The next step was to replace that generic header image. For this, I jumped over to my favorite image generation tool, Midjourney. My secret for creating unique aesthetics in Midjourney is using style references. I often browse X (formerly Twitter) to find cool style codes that other creators are sharing.

I found a beautiful, whimsical paper-cutout style from a creator named Michael Ramone and adapted the prompt for a Thanksgiving theme.

geometric paper, autumnal harvest table

I ran into a common issue: the initial image was square, but my app needed a wide banner. The fix was simple. I reused the prompt but removed the hardcoded aspect ratio parameter (--ar 1:1) and used Midjourney's settings to select a wide 2:1 aspect ratio. The result was a stunning, Tuscan-hill-meets-California-Thanksgiving vibe that was perfect.

With the image saved, I returned to Lovable and gave it a multi-part prompt to update the header:

Here is the image I want for the background. I also want the title of the page to be Claire's Thanksgiving Feast. And all the copy to be more personalized around Claire hosting Thanksgiving at home.

This one change took the app from a generic template to something that truly felt like my party hub.

Step 4: Adding Custom Features for Real-Life Needs

This is where vibe coding really shows its strength. My family is a mix of vegans, gluten-free folks, and dairy-free folks. A standard invite app just doesn't handle this well. I needed a way to add a custom feature for dietary restrictions.

I was very specific with my language to get the UI component I wanted:

Let's add dietary preferences, restrictions to the guest list. Let's start with a multi-select of the most common ones.

Using the term multi-select was key, as it told Lovable to use checkboxes instead of a simple text field, allowing guests to select multiple options. Lovable even knew to pre-populate it with common restrictions like Vegan, Gluten-Free, and Dairy-Free.

To make this feature truly useful, I connected it to the dish-coordination section. I prompted Lovable to take those same restrictions and apply them as tags to the dishes, so everyone would know what they could eat.

Take these restrictions and add tags to the dishes so people can call out common allergens in in their dish, or, um, ingredients.

And just like that, the app had a custom data model connecting guests to dishes through their dietary needs—something that would have taken hours to code manually was done in minutes.

Workflow 2: The Ultimate AI Recipe Hack with ChatGPT

Now for my favorite little AI life hack. I love cooking with my kids, but online recipes are a nightmare. They list all the ingredients at the top and the instructions at the bottom, forcing you to scroll up and down with messy hands trying to remember measurements. My solution? Use ChatGPT to reformat them.

Step 1: Grab Your Recipe

I started with my absolute favorite Thanksgiving recipe: a Polenta and Sausage Stuffing. It's delicious, gluten-free, and a crowd-pleaser. I simply copied the entire recipe text from the website—intro, ingredients, instructions, and all.

Step 2: The Reformatting Prompt

Next, I pasted the text into ChatGPT with a very specific set of instructions. This prompt is designed to create a structured, easy-to-follow format.

Here is a recipe. Please format it into a different structure.
Title
Description
Cook time
Ingredients
Servings
Instructions
For instructions, I want them clearly in steps, step one, step two, et cetera, and I want to make sure both the ingredients and the measurements are in line, so I do not have to go back and reference the ingredients list.

The most important part of this prompt is the final sentence, which explicitly tells the AI to embed the measurements directly into the instruction steps.

Step 3: The Result - A Cook-Friendly Format

ChatGPT returned a perfectly clean, structured recipe. Each step was numbered and contained the exact measurements needed for that step. For example, instead of just "add water and salt," it says, "Bring 6 cups of water and 2 tsp salt to a boil." It's a small change that makes a huge difference in the kitchen.

This simple workflow is so effective that my son and I actually productized it into a website called Runaway Pancakes, where we post kid-friendly recipes in this exact format. It’s a testament to how a small, clever use of AI can solve a real-world frustration.

Bringing It All Together

Going from a generic template to a fully customized, beautifully designed party hub shows how you can use AI as a creative partner. We didn't just accept the first output; we iterated. We brought in our own design taste using Google Fonts, created unique art with Midjourney, and added deeply personal features that solved our specific problems. The ChatGPT recipe hack is the cherry on top—a perfect example of using language models to reorganize information for our own brains.

I am so incredibly thankful for all of you who tune in every week. We recently hit 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is just amazing. I hope these tips and tricks inspire you to build your own personal, useful, and beautiful things with AI. Happy Thanksgiving!

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