Meal planning when one person in the family has allergies

The hard part is not the recipe

If one person in your family has a food allergy, finding a single safe dinner is not the problem. You already have safe dinners. The problem is the other twenty meals in the week: keeping every one of them safe without reading every ingredient list again each time, and without the whole thing depending on one adult remembering that the child cannot have sesame.

An allergen-friendly weekly meal plan is really a record-keeping job. Write down each person's allergens once, in a place the plan can read. Record what is in each recipe once, when you enter it. Then let the plan tell you, at the moment a meal lands on a day, whether anything in the household conflicts with it. What you are removing is not the cooking — it is the re-checking.

Our Table Tonight does that check when a meal is assigned to a slot. It is a free beta, and the check is deliberately a prompt to look rather than a lock: it flags, it never blocks. This guide covers how to set it up, what the check compares, and — just as important — what it cannot see.

Step one: record each person's allergens

Each person records their own dietary profile once. There are three parts to it:

• Allergens — a fixed list of fourteen, the combined EU and FDA set: gluten and wheat, crustaceans and shellfish, eggs, fish, peanuts, soy, milk and dairy, tree nuts, celery, mustard, sesame, sulphites, lupin and molluscs. This is the list the automatic check uses.
• Sensitivities — thirty-two presets organised into six categories, for foods that need flagging but are not allergens.
• Custom sensitivities — anything the presets do not cover, typed in.

A dietary profile belongs to the person, not to a recipe or a plan, and it is used in every household you are a member of. Change it once and every household you cook in reads the new version.

Step two: tag the recipes as you enter them

A recipe carries its own allergen tags, from the same list of fourteen, set on the recipe form. Ingredients are entered as structured rows — quantity, unit, name — rather than as a block of text, which is what lets quantities be scaled and merged later.

Tagging is the step people skip, and it is the step everything else rests on. An untagged recipe is not treated as safe; it simply produces no warning, because there is nothing to compare. Two habits are worth forming:

1. Tag a recipe the first time you enter it, while you are looking at the ingredients anyway. It takes about ten seconds and you never do it again.
2. When you adapt a recipe — swap the butter, drop the nuts — re-check the tags. The substitution is exactly the case where an old tag becomes wrong.

Step three: let the planner check every assignment

When you assign a recipe to a day and meal in a household plan, the app compares that recipe's allergen tags against the recorded allergens of every member of the household. Anything that matches becomes a warning naming the person and the allergen, and the slot shows an amber badge on the grid.

Three details are worth understanding, because they change how you use it:

• It flags, it never blocks. You can plan a dish that conflicts, and sometimes that is exactly right — you are making the sauce separately, or the person it concerns is out that night. The badge is there so the decision is made deliberately instead of by accident.
• The result is worked out at assignment and stored on that slot. It is not recalculated every time the planner loads. If someone adds an allergen to their profile, or you retag a recipe afterwards, re-assign the affected meals so the check runs again against the new information.
• It runs against a household. The comparison is with the members of the household the plan belongs to, so pick the right household at the top of the planner before you start filling the week.

Sides work the same way as mains here. A side dish is an ordinary slot with a recipe on it, so it is checked when you assign it — which matters, because the side is usually where the nuts are.

What the check cannot know

Be clear about the boundary, because a tool that is trusted beyond its limits is worse than no tool. The check compares recorded tags against recorded preferences. That is all it does. It has no way of knowing:

• Cross-contamination. Shared equipment, a fryer, flour in the air, the “may contain” line on a packet — none of that is in the data.
• What a restaurant or takeaway kitchen does. No check runs on eat-out slots at all; see below.
• A recipe nobody tagged. Silence from an untagged recipe means no information, not a clear result.
• Brand changes. A product you have bought for a year can change its recipe. The label in the shop is the authority, not the plan.

Treat a clean week as a plan worth checking, not a plan already checked. The value is that you are re-reading two ingredient lists rather than twenty-one.

Keep the eat-out nights honest

Nights you are eating out or reheating something bought are entered as eat-out slots with a free-text name rather than being left blank. Two things follow. The slot counts as a planned night, so the week reads as complete and nobody wonders whether Wednesday was forgotten. And no allergen check runs on it, because there is no recipe and nothing to compare — which is honest rather than reassuring, and the right way round.

A useful habit is to put the restaurant's name in the slot. When you are deciding where to eat next month, the plan tells you which places you have already had the allergy conversation with.

Shopping from the plan

Generate the shopping list from the plan for whatever date range you are shopping for. The app collects ingredients from the cooked slots in that range, scales them by any servings overrides, merges duplicates so two recipes needing the same ingredient produce one line, and groups everything by category. Eat-out slots are skipped.

For an allergy household the merging is the part that matters, and it is also the part to watch. One line reading “500g pasta” may be serving two different meals, and if one of those meals is the safe one, that line needs to be the safe product — or two lines. Where a substitution is not obvious from the ingredient name, write it into the recipe itself, so it comes through onto every list built from it rather than being remembered in the aisle.

The list is shared with the household and updates live as items are ticked, so whoever is in the shop is working from the same list as whoever is at home reading the label photograph you just sent them.

The weekly routine, in short

1. Every member records their allergens and sensitivities once.
2. Every recipe gets its allergen tags when it is entered or changed.
3. Assign meals in the household plan and read the warnings as you go.
4. Mark eat-out nights as eat-out; do the allergy conversation in person.
5. Generate the shopping list, and check labels for anything substituted.

Set up once, the weekly work is step three and step five. Everything the plan can check, it checks at the moment the decision is made; everything it cannot check is named above, so you know exactly which reading is still yours to do.