Coming soon: meal planning with room for real life

“What’s for dinner?” is a perfectly reasonable question. It just gets a little tiring when it turns up every day.

We’re working on The Yum Pandemic’s Weekly Meal Planner to make answering it easier. You’ll be able to turn recipes you fancy cooking into a plan you can actually use, with room for busy evenings, leftovers and the occasional “someone else is cooking” entry.

The planner is still in development, but here’s what we’re designing.

Start with as much of a plan as you need. That might mean dinners for the coming week, a few days around a busy weekend, or an undated collection of meals to use later. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks each have their place. Empty spaces are allowed. Nobody needs an appointment with a banana.

You’ll be able to give your plan a name, choose dates if you want them, and add recipes to the appropriate meals. A meal can contain several dishes, so your main, side and accompanying salad can sit together.

Finding those dishes should feel familiar. The planner will connect directly with TYP’s recipes, including your saved favourites and recently planned choices. You’ll be able to search and narrow your options while keeping the meal you’re planning in view.

Spotted a recipe that makes you think “that looks delicious”? 

Open its preview to look at the photograph, ingredients, cooking time and method information before deciding. The idea is to give you enough detail to answer “Will I actually cook this on Tuesday?” without sending you off through a procession of browser tabs.

Choose your servings, review your selections, then add them to the meal. You’ll also be able to add a dish while browsing its recipe page. Your recipe discoveries and your weekly plans will work together.

Servings belong to each dish individually. You might want more of the main and less of a side, or be cooking different quantities on different days. Where recipe data supports it, ingredient amounts and nutrition information will scale with your chosen servings. Planned totals will be clearly labelled; they describe the food you’ve added, rather than pretending to know what anybody actually ate.

Plans can change after you make them, of course. You’ll be able to move a recipe, swap it for another, copy a meal or reuse a whole plan. A week that worked well can become the starting point for another, saving you from rebuilding it dish by dish.

There’s also room for notes such as “leftovers”, “eating out” or “no cooking tonight”. That’s useful planning too. The planner won’t assume a note about leftovers means it knows exactly what’s in your fridge.

For those who like keeping a little record

Optional meal statuses and private notes will let you mark what happened or leave yourself a reminder for next time. “Make more sauce” is the sort of culinary wisdom worth preserving.

We’re also designing a shopping-list companion for the meals you choose, with space to mark what you already have and add your own items. Its release timing is still being worked out, so we’ll confirm that separately. Reminder options are being planned too; we’ll share how those will work once the delivery arrangements are settled.

Having recipes, quantities and meal choices together should make it easier to spot what needs preparing and shop with a clearer idea of what you’ll use. It may also help you avoid buying ingredients for three ambitious dinners when you’re only home for one.

BUT, I WANT IT NOW!

We’re designing the website planner for both larger screens and phones, so you can look over a week at your desk or check a meal on a smaller screen.

We’ll share launch and availability details as development progresses. In the meantime, have a look through your saved TYP recipes. Your next week’s dinners might already be waiting there.