"Dear blender, won't you help a first offender?"

[rosefox]

I'm looking for a meal planning app/site that:

* Works on a Mac (browser-based is fine)
* Lets me put in my own recipes
* Doesn't count calories/calculate nutrition, or lets me turn off that "feature"
* Calculates portions consumed and remaining
* Ideally doesn't suggest other recipes (I don't know why I'm shocked that most meal planning apps are in fact meal plan apps that tell you what to make, but that is not what I want)
* Ideally makes shopping lists
* Realizes that at a single mealtime, different people may be eating different things

That last one seems to be the sticking point, and I don't understand why! Surely the need to pack children's school lunches or accommodate a picky eater is not unusual. But all the screenshots I see have a single recipe for every meal of the day, as though everyone in the house is going to eat Easy Strawberry Parfait with Granola for breakfast like it's a sitcom. This isn't the same functionality as being able to add side dishes to the menu; dishes need to be specifically assigned per person per meal. Otherwise Monday breakfast will say "Omelette, smoothie" and I won't have any idea how many omelettes and how many smoothies we'll be making.

Regarding portions consumed and remaining, I want to be able to start the week with, say, 16 servings of chili, and allocate them throughout the week—but only to me and J, because X doesn't eat chili, and on some days I might have chili for lunch while he has chili for dinner—and know how much will be left to freeze at the end of the week. If we plan to make six servings of pasta on Tuesday, I want to be able to allocate four of them for dinner Tuesday night and two more for lunch the next day. I can use Airtable for most aspects of meal planning, but not for this one.

Am I going to end up writing my own app or doing this in Excel or something? Why is this so hard?!

EDIT: I figured out how to do it in Airtable. Grarh.

Comments

[spark]

It sounds like an app for caterers or small restaurants might better fit your criteria? A look through https://www.getapp.com/hospitality-travel-software/catering/ gives me the impression they'd include a lot of stuff you probably don't need, but the food inventory/scheduling/portions etc might fit?

ETA https://getfillet.com/en/ might be worth a look.

[rosefox]

Oh, that's such a good idea! Thank you! Fillet doesn't seem to do menu planning, only inventory management—I think it's actually a competitor to the company J works for—but this is a very useful pointer.

[avivasedai]

Did anyone else read that last link initially as "gefilte.com?" No, just me? Okay.

[bigherman]

As a person who's lived alone for eight years, and rarely has another person over to eat (even before all... this), this is FASCINATING to me. I pretty much stick to my staples and replenish those when I go to the store, and don't shop outside that, unless I'm trying a special recipe. Do you plan your meals in advance? What is the advantage for your household? Do you use fridge organizers (I live and die by my fridge organizers!)?

[rosefox]

The advantages of planning meals in advance are a) have enough food for everyone while minimizing our grocery shopping and b) reduce cognitive load ("What should I eat?") during the week. Ideally we bulk-cook on the weekends when we have time and then everything during the week is reheated or otherwise takes minimal effort. After a nine-hour work day, no one has time to cook anything that takes a long time or wants to wrangle a hungry five-year-old with one hand while stirring the pan with the other. We used to have adult dinner after Kit went to bed, but cooking noises could wake them, and at this point we've all shifted to wanting dinner at 6 p.m. when they want it. So it has to be something that can be made in five minutes, and that takes planning and prep.

What's a fridge organizer? I have labels on the shelves but no one pays much attention to them...

[bigherman]

Yeah, that makes sense. I think I've accomplished the same thing with my staples routine, then. I make pasta for dinner every night, cook on of my three staple meat substitutes, put it on the pasta with seasoning and cheese, and cook whatever vegetable looks good in the fridge on the side. TJs Italian sausage with herbs and parm, Field Roast Apple-Sage with TJs 21 seasoning salute and parm, or a jar of red sauce with TJs ground beef. Now and then I'll do sauteed shallots/savory/marjoram with feta over pasta, or goat cheese/lemon/black pepper/sauteed arugula if I've had a higher protein rest of the day or am having some fish (and I use Barilla+, which has more protein but tastes like normal pasta). I had no idea how standardized my meals here are until I thought about this planning you're talking about. I think I basically buy the same groceries every time, so I don't have to think about it, just have to make a note if I'm running out of something like mayo or lemon curd that is more occasional. I've got dinner 'cooking' down to about... ten minutes, not counting the time when veggies are roasting or pasta is boiling, and I'm not actively stirring and stuff. Chopping up a fennel or some carrots, or tossing some lettuce with oil and vinegar, while the pasta cooks, and a sausage fries up, doesn't take long, though of course I'm only chopping up enough veggies for one.

My fridge is basically like a chest of drawers inside using these clear rectangular organizing bins that are the perfect size for things.

Bottom shelf: I've got four that are the width of a normal jar, one for pickles and sour things (the big jars go in the door), three for jams and sweet things, so when I want something I slide out the bin a bit and retrieve the jar I want, even if it was all the way at the back of the fridge. Like a card catalog, but for jars? Then a large bin that takes up the rest of the space, for cheese.

Middle shelf: Large bin for meats. The rest of shelf is free-form, like egg cartons (I usually buy three dozen at a time, which stack perfectly in the space) and leftovers from takeout and stuff.

Top shelf: Large bin for breads (I generally keep on hand brown sandwich bread, nutty/seedy sandwich bread, english muffins and a fancy loaf from my local bakery, and maybe challah or something special like that). Medium for stuff like onions, shallots, lemons, herbs, garlic, apples and other snack fruit. Behind this bin is a cold spot that freezes anything that hangs out there, so that's where the maple syrup and next-milk live. A large for veg (which often overflows in the free space in the middle of the middle shelf, now that I'm buying like 3-4 weeks of food at a time. I've found that fennel, carrots, beets all keep really well for that period of time, so I go through my baby lettuces, arugula, spinach and other more delicates before moving on to broccoli, zucchini, and then to the sturdiest stuff, though I have had butter lettuce and arugula make it two weeks no problem).

If there's ever a spill in the fridge, it gets contained to one or two bins, which I can slide out, empty, clean, and clean whatever was in them before putting back. Often one random bin gets weirdly gunky, and instead of it being a big deal to clean the fridge, it's compartmentalized or subdivided and thus much easier to tackle. Also, liquid spills get contained, instead of going everywhere.

A picture is a worth a thousand words etc. and I can dm one to ya on twitter if you want.

[Took some clicking to figure out what graft on, stem, and uproot meant, whew. Hopefully I'm not just making a new comment but replying to yours.]

[rosefox]

Hee, sorry about my obscure Dreamwidth style! I made it when I was 25 and thought it was cool. :) You can always add format=light& to a Dreamwidth URL after the ? to see it in the conventional style.

That chest of drawers idea is brilliant—I can totally visualize it. I'm not sure it's compatible with having a five-year-old (we're at the stage of wanting to encourage the idea of putting things in the fridge when one is done, which means we can't be too picky about where they go or set up obstacles to the milk being shoved in with the veggies or whatever) but it's a lovely dream for a few years from now.

[chevdelachar]

PlanToEat might work for you. I've used it for years. You can list a recipe, an ingredient, and a note separately for each meal (breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner) and also put multiple recipes in each category. There's a way to change number of servings you want out of each recipe (doubled, halved, etc) and it'll tell you how much of each ingredient to buy. Plus batch import is good, both from textdump and from a recipe website using a bookmarklet. It's pretty sophisticated.

[rosefox]

Thanks! I looked into it, but it doesn't seem to do the per-person menus that I want it to do. I ended up making it work in Airtable.