About

Why I built this

We kept meaning to cook and kept ordering instead. Thursday would come round, nobody had decided anything, and the phone was right there.

The meal planners I tried all wanted to be recipe websites. Infinite scrolling, dishes nobody here would eat, a shopping list for a dinner we were never going to make. What I wanted was much smaller: the twenty or so things we already cook, laid against the week, so that filling in Thursday takes ten seconds.

So mealgrep keeps a closed recipe box, and plans get made by picking from it. You can still type in whatever actually happened — takeout, leftovers, toast — because that's real, and a planner that pretends otherwise is one you stop opening by March.

The half I care about more

You log what got eaten, per person, with a sentence about why. "Too tired." "She wouldn't touch it." "Swimming ran late." After a month those sentences are worth more than any recipe. They tell you which meals you keep planning and never make, and which Tuesday was always going to end in a takeaway.

Then the counting, which I'd never keep up by hand: how many different plants everyone got through, how often peanut turned up (early introduction is the current advice with a small child in the house), how much of the week came out of a packet. You set the numbers yourself. There are no streaks and nobody else sees them.

How it's built

One person, evenings, on Cloudflare Workers with a D1 database. The planning intelligence isn't in the app — it's in whoever is using it. That's why a human filling in the grid and Claude filling it in through the connector go through exactly the same commands.

It's a personal project that my family uses every week. If something is broken or annoying, the Feedback tab sits on the side of every page once you're signed in, and I read all of it. Or write to jon@blubberroom.com. - Jon