Find a recipe

Equal House carries a large recipe catalogue, so a week of meals does not have to come out of your head. Mostly the planner picks from the catalogue for you, and a recipe reaches you through a plan or through the cooking task that came from one. When you want a particular dish, browse the recipes on our website; from version 1.16.0 of the app you can add the one you like straight to your plan.

Get recipes into your week

1. Meals tab → New plan. Set how many days, the most prep time you want, a budget and any dietary needs, then generate.
2. Every day in the plan comes back with a meal from the catalogue.
3. Tap a day to open it. If that meal came from the catalogue, the sheet carries View recipe — ingredients and method in full.

Those ingredients then join the shopping list on their own.

Pick a recipe on equal.house

From version 1.16.0 of the app.

Once your app is on 1.16.0 and the recipe pages show it, every recipe on equal.house/recipes has an Add to my meal plan button.

1. Tap Add to my meal plan on the recipe’s page. Equal House opens on your phone with that recipe.
2. Choose the night. Each night in this week’s plan says what the recipe would replace. A pinned night can’t be chosen until you unpin it, and choosing a skipped night puts dinner back on.
3. Tap Add to that night. The plan opens with the recipe in place, and its cooking task, the shopping list and the calendar all follow.

No plan for this week yet? Pick a night anyway: Equal House plans the rest of the week around the recipe, and you can swap anything afterwards.

Don’t have the app yet? The button still works. Install Equal House from the page it takes you to, and the recipe comes with you: it is waiting when you have set up your family. On an iPhone, tap Allow Paste when you first open the app and it asks to paste from Safari — that is how the recipe gets across. On a computer, scan the code on that page with your phone’s camera.

On an iPhone, Safari keeps the page open rather than switching to the app. Tap Open this recipe in the app on that page, or Open on the Equal House banner at the top.

The same screen is in the app from version 1.16.0: open any recipe and tap the Add to meal plan button at the top to cook it on another night.

Dietary needs are a filter, not a guarantee

The labels the planner filters on — vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, dairy free, contains nuts — are worked out automatically from each recipe’s ingredients, and its nutrition and costs are estimates. Treat them as a guide: check the packaging of what you buy, especially for an allergy or coeliac disease, because brands differ and a recipe never says “may contain”. More in the recipes section of our terms.

Not that one

• The swap arrows on a day fetch a different recipe, keeping the same prep time, budget and dietary limits.
• The pin next to it keeps a meal you like, so regenerating the plan leaves it alone.
• Skip this lunch or Skip this dinner, inside the meal, drops just that meal — its cost, its ingredients and, for a dinner, its cooking task — while the other meal that day stays as planned. Turn it off again and they all come back. On a dinner-only plan the switch reads Skip this day. The right answer for a takeaway, a night out or somebody else’s cooking.

Seeing a recipe from a task

If a cooking task came from a meal plan, the task itself carries a View recipe link — so the person cooking does not have to go and find it. Find the task on the Tasks tab: View recipe is in its summary when you tap it, in its ⋮ menu, and at the top of the task editor. Cooking tasks are not on the calendar.

Cooking something of your own

The catalogue is not compulsory, but it is where the planner’s meals come from — a day cannot be retyped with a meal of your own. To cook your own thing, skip the day and add the cooking as an ordinary task, and put whatever you need for it on the shopping list yourself: the plan’s shopping list takes extra items you add by hand.