Recurring foods are useful for quickly getting the meal plans to reflect your existing eating habits. We've found if our meal plans look mostly like what we already eat, just with better portions and some tasty new recipes once in a while, we stick to the plan much better.
To add a Recurring Food, head to the section labeled as such from the sidebar. Find a food you want from the Food Search in the sidebar, and either drag it into the meal you want, or click "Add".
Tips for success:
If you have a breakfast you like to eat every morning, select the foods or recipes to show up "always" during your breakfast meal. If you want your breakfasts to have some variety, but only between 3 or 4 recipes, select those recipes to recur "often". If you ONLY want those recipes, you can tell a meal type to "only use recurring foods", and then the generator will only use your selected foods while still handling the portion control.
The best way to have total control over the meal plans is to find a bunch of foods and recipes that you know you'll like or you want to try, set them to recur "often" in a meal, and have the meal only use your recurring foods. Ideally select 15-20 foods if you want some variety, and the generator will build your meal plan from only those foods.
A good routine is to set Breakfast to always have one or two staple foods that you like, lunch to have a handful of foods that you like to rotate between (or a standard restaurant meal if you eat out), and leave dinner a suprise that will round out your nutrition targets with whatever nutrients are missing.
We may add more frequencies other than "always" and "often" later, but if you just want something to recur only slightly more often than normal, click the food to open more details, and then "Star" it to add to favorites, or give it a thumbs up to tell our algorithms you like it.
If you want a food to never show up, use the "thumbs down" button.
You Favorite foods can be quickly accessed from the Food Bank search. To add something to favorites, first click the image of the food in your meal plan to open up the details page.
Then click the star icon to add it to favorites.
The list can be accessed from the search bar, making it easy to add your favorite foods to daily plans or recurring foods lists.
Leftovers are a great way to simplify grocery lists and prepare yourself to eat healthy when you have less time to cook.
To enable leftovers (this is a Premium-only feature), click the "Settings" menu and scroll down to Leftovers. Then check the 'enable leftovers' box and set up a Leftovers pattern.
As you modify the leftovers pattern, a preview will update to show you how leftovers will be created and used throughout the week. You can have as many leftovers patterns as you like, but a meal can only be linked with a single leftovers pattern at a time.
Tips: Create seperate meal types (Weekend Lunch, Leftovers breakfast, etc etc) if you want to restrict them to certain days of the week.
tags: no cooking, leftover foods, batch cooking, less groceries, meal types