How to plan a week of meals with your whole household

What a shared meal plan actually is

A shared meal plan is one week of meals that everyone in the house can see and change, rather than a plan that lives in one person's head. It says which nights someone is cooking, what they are cooking, which nights are takeaway or leftovers, and what needs buying before any of it can happen. If you want to meal plan with your partner, or across a family with children, the plan has to be a shared object: a place both of you write to, not a message one of you sends.

One person holding the week in their head fails in a specific way. It works right up to the evening they are late, ill or away, and then nobody else knows that Thursday was supposed to be the chicken that has been defrosting since Tuesday. The information was never wrong; it was just never written down anywhere the other adult could read it. The same goes for the shopping: a list built from a plan only one person can see gets re-bought, half forgotten, or duplicated by whoever reaches the shop first.

Our Table Tonight is built around that shared object. It is a free beta at the moment. The rest of this guide is the method — decide the shape of the week, assign the meals, let the shopping list come out of the plan, and record what you actually made — and how each step works in the app.

Step one: set up the household, once

Everything shared in the app hangs off a household. Create one, then invite the other people in it. An invite generates a link that expires after seven days; the person opening it signs in and joins. Each member can carry a different name inside each household, so the same account can be “Dad” in one and your first name in another.

Membership is what makes the rest work. Household members share the week's plan, the shopping lists generated from it, and any recipes explicitly shared with the household. Anyone in the household can assign a meal, tick something off the shopping list, or add a snack slot to Wednesday. There is no owner-only step in the weekly routine.

Step two: decide the shape of the week together

Do this before anyone opens a recipe. The question is not “what shall we eat”; it is which nights are cooking nights at all. Most weeks have fewer than people assume. Work through the seven days and mark each one as: someone cooks, we eat leftovers, we eat out or order in, or nobody is here.

This is the conversation that makes the plan honest. A plan with seven cooked dinners in a week that really contains a late meeting and a birthday will be abandoned by Wednesday, and the abandoned plan takes the shopping list down with it.

In the planner, a night that is not a cooking night is still a filled slot. Mark it as an eat-out or leftovers slot and give it a name — “curry from the freezer”, “Nonna's”, “pizza after football”. Those slots are one free-text field covering both cases. They count toward the week's progress, they show differently on the grid, and they are left out of shopping list generation, which is the behaviour you want: you are not buying ingredients for a night you are not cooking.

Step three: assign the meals

Now fill the cooking nights. The planner shows a grid of days with rows for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. You can show between one and seven days at a time, and that choice is remembered in your browser, so a phone can sit on one day while a laptop shows the whole week. The week starts on whichever day you set in your profile.

Each assignment picks a recipe for a day and meal. A few things are worth knowing while you do it:

• Each meal is one main plus as many sides as you want. Sides sit under the main and expand when you tap it; they flow into the shopping list and the allergen check exactly like the main does.
• Every recipe carries an effort level worked out from its prep and cook times — express, easy, involved or project. It is a fast way to keep the long cook on the night you have time for it rather than on the night you do not.
• You can override the servings for a single slot without touching the recipe. Cooking for six on Sunday and two on Monday changes the quantities on the shopping list and leaves the original recipe alone.
• If you set a time you want to eat, the slot can work backwards through the prep and cook time and tell you when to start. That is opt-in per slot, and it needs a serve time to compute anything.

When two nights should be the same meal, copy the slot rather than assigning it twice. The copy button on a filled slot offers the other days in the same week, and you can send it to a different meal — Sunday's dinner becomes Monday's lunch. It warns you before overwriting anything already in the target slot, and it brings the servings override with it. Copying is within the current week only.

Snacks, if you have children

Snack slots are separate from the three meals and configurable per day. The default number comes from the household setting, falling back to your personal one, and you can add or delete a snack on a single day without changing the rest of the week. Deleting Wednesday's second snack affects Wednesday only.

Step four: let the shopping list come from the plan

Do not write the shopping list by hand. Generate it from the date range you are actually shopping for — the coming week, the next two days, a fortnight before a holiday. The app collects the ingredients from every cooked slot in that range, scales them by any servings overrides, merges duplicates by ingredient so two recipes wanting onions produce one line, and groups the result by category so the list follows the shop rather than the recipes. Eat-out and leftovers slots are skipped.

The list is shared with the household and updates live. If one of you is in the shop and ticks off the milk, it disappears for the other. That is the part that stops the double-buying: not better handwriting, but one list that two people are looking at from different aisles.

Step five: record what you actually made

At the end of the week — or when you navigate into the next one — mark the meals. Each slot gets Made, Didn't Make, and optionally a rating out of five, and they all submit together. Only Made writes to your cook history.

This step is easy to skip and worth doing. It is the difference between a record of what you intended to eat and a record of what you ate. Over a few weeks it tells you which recipes actually get cooked, which ones you keep planning and abandoning, and which nights of the week never survive contact with reality. Plan the next week from that, not from the version of your household that exists in a good mood on a Sunday afternoon.

1. Decide the shape of the week together — cooking, leftovers, out, away.
2. Fill the cooking nights; mark the rest as eat-out or leftovers so they still count.
3. Generate the shopping list for the range you are shopping for.
4. Mark the meals made at the end of the week.

Four steps, and only the second one takes any real time. Do them in that order and the plan stops being one person's job.