Plan a week of meals

Deciding what to eat is a daily piece of mental work that a plan removes almost entirely.

1. Meals tab, along the bottom of the screen.
2. Start a week.
3. Fill the days — pick from the recipe catalogue, or type your own.

On the Free plan a meal plan covers the next three days, the same rolling horizon as the rest of the app. A full week or longer is part of Equal House Pro.

While it is made

Putting a plan together takes a little while, and a screen shows what is happening meanwhile. When the plan is ready, the ring on that screen turns into Bric, he hops, it says Your meal plan is ready, and the plan opens. With a screen reader on, it is said out loud instead.

What comes out of it

• Cooking tasks, assigned to whoever is cooking, which count in the fairness picture like any other work
• A shopping list, gathered from the recipes — see the shopping list
• The dinner time each evening, so the calendar knows when the evening actually starts

Meal times

Set the household’s usual dinner time in More → Settings → Dinner time. It is what stops the app suggesting a two-hour bake on a night with football at six.

Meal times, the line at the top of a plan (for example “Dinner 19:00 · Lunch 12:30”), sets the times for that plan’s meals. Tap it to change them:

• Dinner at sets every dinner in the plan in one go. Each dinner’s cooking task is timed to be ready for it, so the “cook from” time under each dinner moves with it. Until you set one, the plan’s dinners follow your usual time, and Use your usual time takes the plan’s own time off again.
• Lunch at does the same for every lunch in the plan. Lunches have no cooking task, so only their time changes. Lunches have no usual time: a plan without a lunch time keeps its lunches off the clock, and Take the time off puts it back that way.

To give one meal a time of its own, tap its time, or open its ⋮ and choose Change dinner time or Change lunch time. Back to the plan’s time, in the same menu, takes its own time off so it follows the plan’s again. When the plan has no time of its own, it says Back to your usual time for a dinner and Take the time off for a lunch.

Setting the whole plan’s time changes the meals that had a time of their own too. Before you do, Meal times says how many there are, for example “One dinner has its own time; this changes it too.”

If you’ve put the plan on the calendar, its meals move there as well. A cooking task that’s already done keeps its time.

On an older version of the app you can only change one dinner’s time at a time, from its ⋮.

Changing your mind

Swap any day. The shopping list follows.

Skip a meal — tap it, then Skip this day (or Skip this lunch / Skip this dinner on a day with both) — and three things follow it: its cost comes off the plan’s total, its ingredients come off the shopping list, and a dinner’s cooking task comes off Tasks. A short note on the plan says so, naming the cook. Turn the skip off again and all three come back, with the same person cooking.

If you have put the plan on the calendar, the calendar keeps up too: a skipped meal leaves it, a swapped one takes the new recipe’s name, and the Shopping event’s list is rewritten to match.

Why it counts as work

Cooking is one of the largest single blocks of household time and one of the most reliably invisible in these arguments. Putting it in the plan means it is counted.