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Planning

Choose meals for specific days or keep a few ready for any day of the week. Planning and Fill the week work without AI.

Before you start

Add a few recipes, with accurate ingredients and servings.
Select the right household. Its time zone and week-start setting determine which day and week the plan uses.
Household owners/admins manage Settings → Household → Planning. This selects which meal types automatic planning fills; you can still add other meals manually.

Add a meal and set servings

Open Plan and use the week controls to choose your week.
On a day, choose Add breakfast, Add lunch, Add dinner, or Add a snack.
Choose A recipe, search, and select a recipe. For leftovers or eating out, choose A note instead and enter the text.
Open the meal’s menu and choose Move or change to adjust When, Meal, Servings, an optional With recipe, or Note. Choose Save.

Expected result: the meal appears in its day and meal slot. Leaving servings empty uses the recipe’s count. Meal servings determine ingredient amounts for shopping; changing the recipe page’s display alone is not a change to this plan entry.

For flexibility, use Add a meal under This week, any day. Choose Tonight when you are ready to put it on today’s plan, or Move or change to choose another day. A note can reserve a meal without adding recipe ingredients to the shopping list.

Set theme nights

Open Settings → Household → Theme nights.
Choose a theme for each dinner, or A tag of your own… and enter a recipe tag.
Return to Plan and try Fill the week.

Expected result: dinner suggestions prefer recipes matching the theme. Leftovers and eat-out themes leave those dinners empty. A theme applies to dinner, not every meal of that day.

Themes are not absolute restrictions: if no eligible recipe fits a theme, Merran can suggest another recipe and explain that nothing fits yet. Add matching recipes or tags to improve the next suggestions. Household Tastes and diet settings also affect eligibility; inspect ingredients yourself when a dietary restriction matters.

Fill the week

Open Plan → Fill the week on the current or a future week.
Choose which of the enabled meal types to fill. Dinner is initially selected when enabled.
Review each proposed meal and its reason. Use Something else for… to try another idea or Leave…empty to omit a slot.
Choose Add … meals to put the remaining ideas on the plan.

Expected result: selected ideas fill empty slots from today onward. Existing dated meals stay in place, and nothing is added by merely opening the dialog.

Ideas come from your library, not an AI search. Recipes recently planned or made are excluded around a two-week window. Tags help identify breakfast, lunch, and snack recipes; recipes tagged as sauces or other meal components are not suggested alone. Household tastes and weeknight time limits can narrow the choices. Pantry ingredients, ratings, and optional store price information influence selection. A budget is a preference based on known costs, not a guaranteed spending cap.

Optional: plan automatically each week

In Settings → Household → Plan each week, enable Plan the week ahead for us.
Choose the day, time, and meals. The schedule uses the household’s time zone.
Enable Put what those meals need on the list only if you want list creation too.
Check the next run shown in settings and review the resulting plan after it runs.

Expected result: Merran fills the next week’s eligible empty meals using the same library-based suggestions. This does not require AI and does not send anything to a store cart. The server must be running to process the job; after downtime, it can catch up for the remaining part of the intended week.

Change plans

Use a meal’s menu to Move or change, Skip, or Remove it. Plan it again reverses a skip. Repeat last week in the week’s menu can reuse meals without replacing already planned slots. Review servings and dates after repeating.

Choose Mark cooked when a planned meal has been made. This can consume its pantry stock. Not cooked yet reverses that status and restores recorded pantry deductions. Avoid marking meals cooked simply to hide them; use Skip when you did not make them.

Troubleshooting and limits

What you see	What to check
No suggestions or some slots remain empty	Add more recipes, tag meal types, and check tastes, recent meals, and time limits. You can still choose a recipe manually.
A meal type says Not filled for you	A household admin can enable it under Planning. This does not prevent manual additions.
A theme is missed	Check recipe names/tags and the explanation on the suggestion. Themes can fall back when nothing eligible matches.
The wrong day or week is shown	Check the household’s time zone and Week starts on, rather than only your device clock.
The automatic run did not fill anything	Check that it is enabled, the next/last run, the server’s availability, and whether slots were already filled or no recipes fit.

Changing a listed meal can update its outstanding shopping ingredients. Check the list after changing servings, recipes, or dates, especially when some items have already been bought.

Next steps

Create the shopping list and check pantry deductions, or cook a planned meal.