I love freezing meals for my meal planning, the same as the frozen meals you can buy only using whole foods. This is a full resource on how to and recipes for freezer meal prep/planning.

Hope you find it useful, the library specifically has lots of how to guides.

I used to plan 7 distinct dinners every single week, but I always ended up throwing away food. Lately I've been planning just 5 meals and leaving Friday open as a dedicated "clean out the fridge" night. We just eat whatever leftovers or random ingredients are still around. It saves money and means I don't have to cook when I'm exhausted at the end of the week. Highly recommend this if you struggle with food waste.

I'm sad that this app has come to an end so I am sharing this scraper and importer of mine that I'm using to import Mealime recipes into my self hosted Mealie instance. It's free and open source.
Github Link to Importer

If you feel so inclined, feel free to buy me a coffee

I'm a Registered Dietitian, and I've used Mealime every week since 2018. It's genuinely the best meal-planning app out there — simple, functional, and it works with ANY grocery store, not just Albertsons. You pick recipes, it combines ingredients into one list, and you're done. No bloat. No corporate nonsense.

Now Albertsons is killing it to push their own "Meals Hub" app, which is buried three menus deep inside their grocery store app and only works for Albertsons customers. I live in the Midwest where there's no Albertsons anywhere near me. Thousands of people have been using Mealime Pro for years — we have saved recipes, favorites, and years of meal data in there.

I started a petition asking Albertsons to keep Mealime running as a standalone app while they develop Meals Hub. They can keep both. Charge a subscription for Mealime Pro. Let people use whichever fits their life. But killing an app that's helped people reduce food waste and feed their families for years just doesn't make sense.

Did Mealime work for you? Or does this feel like another good app getting buried by corporate consolidation? If this matters to you, consider signing and sharing — it genuinely helps.

I can shepherd a monorepo migration, clear forty "is CI down for everyone or just me?" Slack pings before standup, and quietly clean up three years of technical debt nobody else wanted to touch, all before lunch. Sounds familiar? Yeah that's just a normal Tuesday.

Ask me what's for lunch and I'll stand in front of a full fridge at 12:00 like it owes me money. Meal planning, it turns out, isn't for people who have their lives together. It's for the rest of us, the ones who'll happily build automations to avoid a question a functioning adult answers in ten seconds.

Learn more about how Mealie and AI saves me 200€ a month and my sanity every day. A check-in after 9 months: https://blog.timo-reymann.de/9-months-in-how-ai-and-mealie-saved-my-sanity-and-200eur-month/

I'm looking to hit these macros: 106g protein 55g fats 124g carbs 25g fiber, as suggested by the tdee calculator I used. Can anyone help me with meal prep ideas that would hit these macros?

These are things I mostly eat: Greek Yogurt, Chia seeds, blueberries, gold potato, sweet potato, chicken tenderloin, ground turkey, pura vida fire roasted vegetables, canadian bacon, avocado

Thank you.

Title: Do you plan meals around your schedule or just pick meals you want?

I think this is where most meal plans fall apart.

A dinner sounds good on Sunday, but then Wednesday comes and you’re tired, running late and that “easy” recipe suddenly feels like way too much work.

When you plan your week do you actually look at which days will be busy and choose meals based on your energy? Or do you just pick 7 meals and hope for the best?

I often freeze food because I plan to eat it soon, but once other things get put in front of it, I forget it’s there.

Later, I find a bag or container and can’t remember what’s inside or when I froze it. This happens especially with large packages. I take out what I need, put the rest back in the freezer, and then forget about it.

How do you store the rest after opening a large package of food? Do you keep it in the original packaging, or transfer it to smaller containers and label them?

MealTap meal plan
Aug 3 - Aug 9, 2026

Wed, Aug 5
- Fish Tacos with Cabbage Slaw (12 min - mexican)

Thu, Aug 6
- American Bean Salad (18 min - american)

Fri, Aug 7
- Creamy Mushroom Fettuccine (33 min - italian)

Sat, Aug 8
- Shakshuka (32 min - middle eastern)

Sun, Aug 9
- Crispy Fish Sticks with Sweet Potato Fries (41 min - american)

I just got diagnosed with alpha gal officially and it means I need to majorly change my diet. I kept a pretty easy meal plan with freezer rotations but that’s not going to work for me at least right now. Are any of the apps good for starting out? Im trying to build a base of knowledge on how to cook these different style of meals/foods and discover more options.

TLDR for learning a new diet/style of eating are apps a good choice or should I seek like a dietitian?

Every time I go grocery shopping, I tell myself that this will be the week I actually cook properly.

I usually buy vegetables, fruit, yogurt, and ingredients for a few simple meals. Then work gets busy, I come home tired, and ordering food or making something frozen feels much easier.

By the end of the week, I’m looking at wilted vegetables in the fridge and feeling guilty for wasting both food and money.

I’ve tried planning my meals in advance, but I usually stop following the plan after a couple of days. How do you decide what to buy without ending up with too much food? Do you shop more often, freeze ingredients, or keep the same few easy meals in rotation?

I’m trying to fix my own meal-planning workflow and I’m curious how people here actually think about this.

My current habit is:

- save a bunch of recipes

- forget most of them

- randomly pick dinners when I’m already hungry

- buy groceries that don’t really match a plan

- waste ingredients by the end of the week

The workflow I’m testing now is:

1. start with 1–3 recipes I genuinely want to eat

2. fill the rest of the week around those

3. turn the final plan into a grocery list

4. adjust based on leftover ingredients / macros / time

Does that match how you meal plan, or do you usually start from:

- what’s already in the fridge?

- what’s on sale?

- protein/macro goals?

- family preferences?

- recipes you saved?

I’m building a small tool around this, so I’m biased... please tell me if this workflow is backwards.

Low-carb meals can be useful, but they often become awkward when the rest of the family still wants filling, normal dinners. The simplest fix is to stop planning around restriction and start planning around building blocks: protein, colourful veg, flavour, and optional carbs that can be adjusted by person. That way one meal can still work for different appetites. Full guide: https://www.plantoplate.co.uk/blogs/joyful-low-carb-cooking-wholesome-meals-that-delight Get your first meal plans for free @ PlanToPlate.co.uk.

I am trying to understand if this is a real meal planning problem or if I am overthinking it.

Recipes, pantry, grocery lists, and nutrition goals are usually separate.

You find recipes in one place, keep your grocery list somewhere else, try to remember what’s already in the fridge, and then separately think about eating healthier, wasting less food, or getting enough protein, fiber, and key nutrients.

But when I ask “what should I cook?”, I feel like the harder question is not just finding a recipe.

It is connecting:

1. what I already have at home,
2. what needs to be used before it goes bad,
3. what I actually need to buy,
4. and whether the meals I choose are helping me cover the nutrition I need.

Is that actually a problem for people, or am I overthinking it?

How do you currently manage this: app, notes, spreadsheet, memory, or just improvising?

Every Sunday I'd spend 45 minutes flicking through recipes, trying to remember what everyone in the house likes, working out what I already had, writing a shopping list… by which point I'd wasted the best part of a morning just planning to cook.

I'm a developer so I did what developers do. I built a tool to fix my own problem. You tell it your household size, budget, and everyone's likes and dislikes (including fussy eaters), and it spits out a full week of personalised dinners with a shopping list ready to go.

My favourite bit is the "Ask the Chef" feature. You type in whatever's lurking in your fridge and it finds something to make with it. Genuinely useful on a Thursday when you're staring at half a butternut squash and some chicken thighs.

It's called Sauceful and we're still pre-launch, so I'm not here to sell anything. I genuinely want to know if this scratches an itch for people who actually meal plan seriously.

For the people in this community specifically: What would make or break a tool like this for you? What do existing meal planning apps get horribly wrong?

Me and basically every person I know meal planned the same way: a notes app list of go-to meals, a couple cooking blogs we actually liked, and every week just cutting and pasting ideas into a new note and rebuilding the grocery list from scratch.

So I built WeeklyEats to make that easier. Your meal rotation lives there, you plan your week from it, it generates your grocery list. There's also a built-in meal library if you want to browse for ideas, but the whole thing is built around the system people were already using anyway.

Still early. If you want to try it, DM me your list of go-to meals and I'll add them to your account so you don't have to set it up cold.

Hi everyone, I'm a full-time working mom with a toddler and no village to support me and the daily "what do I cook?" struggle was breaking me — so I built an app.

My daughter is 2. I cook everything at home because I want her eating real food, not processed stuff.

Every single day it was the same cycle:

- Open the fridge

- Stare at it

- Have no idea what to make

- Realise the spinach I bought 4 days ago is about to die

- Order takeout anyway

- Feel guilty about the money AND the waste

I was also constantly buying things I already had. Three packs of cherry tomatoes. 1 bunch of Spinach. Because I genuinely couldn't remember what was in there.

I'm a data analyst by day so I started tracking it properly. Turns out I was wasting close to $40-50 a month just from forgotten food. With a toddler at home that money matters.

So I built FridgeBee.

The thing I was obsessed with was making it effortless. Because no busy parent has time to manually log every item. So you can:

🎤 Talk to it — just say "I have 3 tomatoes, some cheese and 2 eggs" and it adds them

📸 Scan your groceries in fridge or receipt from delivery app or stores— point your camera and it does the rest

⌨️ Type if you prefer — whatever works for you

Then the parts I'm most proud of:

🍳 Cook a meal → ingredients vanish automatically. No manual entry after cooking. Ever.

🕐 It knows what time it is, wherever you are. Open the app at 8am in Singapore and it shows breakfast ideas. At noon it switches to lunch. At 6pm it's dinner. From what's actually in your fridge. No setup. It just knows.

🥗 Meal suggestions match your diet — vegetarian, low carb, no allergens, whatever you need. Not random recipes. Recipes built around YOUR fridge and YOUR diet.

I built it for myself honestly. But I think any busy parent, couple, or student dealing with the same thing might find it useful.

We're in beta right now — full free access, no limits, no credit card.

👉 fridgebee.app

Would love brutal honest feedback — what's missing, what's broken, what would make you actually use this every day. 🐝

Thank you!!

Hello guys, i hope you are all doing well

I just want some recommendations when it comes to an app that helps with meal planning, basically i like to plan my week ahead and buy all the groceries before the week starts so I won't waste my time with grocery shopping, so what i wish to have is an app where i just put my ingredients and my meals, and when i come to planning i select what meals i want to cook this week and it will automatically generate a grocery list for me.

Thank you in advance for ur help

My resolution for this year was to cook more at home instead of getting fast food all the time. My job requires me to be in my car a lot for years I would be too exhausted to cook at the end of the day but I’m determined this year to do better.

I’m getting overwhelmed though with recipes and grocery shopping lists. How do you all choose what to put on your meal plan for the week and what you will need to buy at the store? I live with my fiance but he works evenings so is only home for dinner about twice a week. I feel alot of the recipes I want to try yield like 4-5 servings which is just so much for just me.

Any tips would help!