The one ChatGPT prompt that brought up a childhood memory I didn’t know still existed – VegOut
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I asked a simple AI question — and wound up transported to a kitchen I hadn’t thought about since I was nine years old.
Jordan Cooper / Jul 1, 2025
I asked a simple AI question — and wound up transported to a kitchen I hadn’t thought about since I was nine years old.
The first domino fell because I couldn’t remember the name of a snack. One of those you-don’t-know-you-need-it-until-you-need-it kinds of cravings.
I had just gotten home from work, still in my coat, scrolling on my phone like a raccoon rifling through a recycling bin.
All I knew was: it was chewy, coconut-y, and somehow both candy and not-candy. It showed up at the weirdest times—church bake sales, your friend’s grandma’s kitchen, a birthday party in the church basement—and then vanished for years.
So I opened ChatGPT and typed:
“What’s that vintage no-bake cookie made of shredded coconut and condensed milk?”
Simple, factual. I was hoping for a name. What I got instead was a portal.
The bot answered right away — of course it did.
“You might be thinking of coconut macaroons,” it said, then offered a few more: haystacks, magic bars, something called snowballs. I clicked into a suggested recipe, and that’s when something strange happened.
Because the recipe called for vanilla extract.
And with that word — vanilla — I wasn’t in my kitchen anymore. I was standing in my aunt Letty’s, mid-summer, 1998. I could feel the stick of vinyl linoleum on my bare feet. I could smell the whisper of almond and vanilla from a tiny brown bottle I wasn’t supposed to touch. I could hear her hum—always off-key—while she stirred a saucepan of gooey something on the stove.
I hadn’t thought of that day in decades.
Didn’t know I still had it. But the AI didn’t just name a cookie—it tripped a wire.
Letty was my mom’s older sister, single, sharp-tongued, always with a cigarette in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other.
Her kitchen was chaos.
You had to elbow aside Tupperware towers just to open a drawer. The oven was technically storage. She didn’t cook often, but when she did, it was a big deal—and she always let me help.
That day in July, she had the radio tuned to oldies, the kind where every other song had a doo-wop or a sha-na-na. She was making haystacks: melted butterscotch chips, chow mein noodles, peanuts, and just a splash of vanilla. I stirred while she smoked.
She told me I had “kitchen hands,” whatever that meant. I remember licking the spoon and burning my tongue, and her laughing like it was the funniest thing she’d seen all year.
That memory hadn’t crossed my mind since I was maybe eleven. But there it was again, unspooling like film from a lost reel.
I kept chatting with ChatGPT. I told it about the haystacks. I asked if there were other regional treats like that — things that used pantry scraps and nostalgia more than proper baking.
The suggestions poured in: chocolate oatmeal no-bakes, peanut butter cornflake clusters, Nanaimo bars from Canada.
I don’t know what I was looking for, exactly. But it felt like storytelling. Like asking a friend to sit across the table and say, “Remember these?” Except the friend wasn’t real. The memories, though — those were.
And here’s the part I didn’t expect: the bot didn’t make the memory. It made space for it. Like someone holding open a door long enough for your own thoughts to wander through.
I’ve used AI for spreadsheets, emails, even to name my fantasy football team. But this was the first time it felt like something more.
Not deep or profound — just…weirdly human.
Because how many memories live inside you without a label?
How many old flavors are tied to people you’ve lost or places you left behind?
And what happens when the algorithm doesn’t guess your next click—but reminds you who you were, long before the clicks?
The next night, I bought the ingredients. Chow mein noodles. Butterscotch chips. Peanuts. A splash of vanilla extract. I made haystacks, Letty-style.
My kitchen is small and not nearly as messy. I don’t smoke. I didn’t hum. But when I licked the spoon—still too hot—I laughed. Alone in my apartment, like I was nine again.
The treats were too sweet. My adult tastebuds winced. But I didn’t care. I packed them in a Tupperware, just like Letty would, and texted my sister:
“Remember these?”
She replied instantly with a photo from 2003. Me, missing a front tooth, grinning with butterscotch on my cheek. Letty in the background, blurry but unmistakable.
We talk a lot about AI in extremes — replacing jobs, writing novels, taking over. But sometimes it’s smaller. Stranger. Softer. Sometimes it’s just a digital assistant pointing you back to a part of yourself you forgot was there.
I still don’t know why that prompt hit me the way it did. Maybe the ingredients mattered. Maybe I needed it. Or maybe, like all good memories, it had been waiting patiently — tucked behind a pantry door in the back of my brain — until something cracked it open.
And that’s the magic I didn’t see coming: not that a machine remembered something about me.
But that I did.
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Jordan Cooper is a pop-culture writer and vegan-snack reviewer with roots in music blogging. Known for approachable, insightful prose, Jordan connects modern trends—from K-pop choreography to kombucha fermentation—with thoughtful food commentary. In his downtime, he enjoys photography, experimenting with fermentation recipes, and discovering new indie music playlists.
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