ADHD-friendly recipes that don't lose you halfway

Making dinner neuro-spicy

The chopping was never the hard part. Executive dysfunction is. First there's the wall of awful between you and the fridge. Then task paralysis over what to make. Then a recipe that wants you to read a whole paragraph, hold five steps in working memory and make a dozen tiny decisions while the onions catch. "Season to taste." "Any oil will do." "Five to seven minutes, or until it looks right." Every one of those is a fork in the road, and add a dash of time blindness and a fork in the road is where dinner goes sideways: the step you skipped, the pan you forgot, the twenty minutes that vanished between "simmer" and "stir" because you went to find your phone.

None of that is a character flaw. It's recipes written for neurotypical brains, and that's fixable.

What the ADHD friendly style does

Turn it on in Preferences, under Recipe style, and every method Grub writes follows these rules:

• Prep first. The opening steps get every ingredient out, measured and chopped, one short task each, before the hob goes on. No dashing for the garlic while something burns.
• One action per step, in one short sentence. Do the thing, then look at the next one.
• One exact time. "5 minutes", not "5 to 7". A number you can set a timer for, because time blindness doesn't care that the rice is on.
• A cue for done. "Until golden at the edges." "Until it smells toasty." You know when to move on.
• No choices left to you. No "or", no "if using", no "optional", no "to taste". One answer, every time.
• Fewer pans and bowls, as few as the dish allows, so the washing-up doesn't become the reason you ordered a takeaway.

It changes the words, never the dish. Same recipe, same ingredients, same flavour, written so you can follow it with half your attention on whatever else is going on.

It's steering, so read each step as you go. Grub follows these rules closely but not perfectly: a time range still slips into some recipes, and as with any recipe, check meat and fish are cooked through before you eat.

Object permanence and the veg drawer

Out of sight, out of mind applies to the salad drawer too. The spinach you bought with the best of intentions stops existing the moment the drawer shuts, and turns up a fortnight later having made itself into soup. Add the takeaway you ordered because dinner just didn't happen, and that's the ADHD tax, paid in courgettes.

Grub's whole job is to eat it first. Tell him what's on its last legs, or snap the open fridge and let Super Grub list what he can see, and the forgotten stuff becomes tonight's dinner instead of next week's guilt.

The decision you don't have to make

Before the method, there's the decision, and decision fatigue is real. Forty tabs of recipes, a doomscroll through somebody's life story, none of it quite right, and the spoons you needed for cooking spent on choosing. Grublin doesn't give you a list. It gives you one dinner.

• Tell Grub what you fancy, or what's in the fridge, and get one complete recipe that fits your rules and your kitchen.
• Snap the fridge if typing a list is one task too many. Super Grub reads the shelf for you.
• Bored of it before you've started? Tap Try a different idea and he moves on. Fresh idea, fresh dopamine, and you never lose your place or start from a blank screen. The same seven dinners on rotation is where motivation goes to die.
• Nearly right? Tweak it: milder, quicker, no mushrooms.
• Set your rules once. Allergies, how you eat and your kit are saved and applied to every recipe, so there's nothing to remember at 6pm.

Grub isn't a body double. He is a goblin who lives in your fridge and won't stop talking about dinner, which is the next best thing.

What the AI is told, and what it isn't

The AI model that writes the recipe never hears the word ADHD. Your phone tells Grublin's own server which recipe style you picked, the server turns it into the writing rules above, and only those rules go to the model, so nothing about you or your health goes into the AI's request. It's a writing style, the same as the others, and you can switch it off or change it any time.

The other recipe styles

ADHD friendly is one of three styles, and you pick one at a time:

• New to cooking explains every cooking term in brackets the first time it appears, and names the pan and the heat in every step.
• Executive summary keeps it to a handful of short steps for a confident cook, with every quantity, time and temperature kept.
• Default writes clear steps for an everyday home cook.