I love to cook, and being Vegan it’s more of a necessity than anything else, because takeout and fast-food choices are somewhat limited for me. My wife and I tried many cooking schemes. We started with taking turns every day, then went to 2 days for one, 2 days for the other and 1 day of takeout. The problem with sharing the cooking responsibilities during the week is that we both would go shopping (sometimes together, sometimes separate), and it ultimately led to overlap of items and wasted ingredients at the end of the week. The overlap of items and wasted ingredients felt like throwing money in the trash. We realized that by having one person own the whole week, we could 'inventory' the fridge more effectively.
But then planning for the week became a hassle. I liked to post the menu for the week ahead of time, and this meant having to keep recipes and menus in Google docs - which creates a very rigid way of planning. I must have something like 60 different menus saved on Google Drive:
The problem was, sometimes I would want some particular dish, sometimes my kids wanted a dish, and so every menu would become unique. All in all, it became a recipe management nightmare!
So finally I decided to code up the Smart Menu Planner website. This is where the "Smart" part comes in: it turns out that collecting and aggregating ingredients across recipes, matching ingredient spellings, and managing menus when you have over 100 recipes is a tough problem to solve. My goal has always been to integrate AI to help plan new recipes for those moments when you’re feeling stuck.
Now, I can plan the week in literally a few minutes—or even faster if I copy a previous menu and swap a few things. Because it’s a hosted website, I can check off items on my phone while I cook or shop. Overall this has saved me a ton of time, and I’m hoping it does the same for you!