The Meal Planner (under 🌳 the Treehouse) lays your week out as a board — days across the top, meals down the side. Plan breakfast, lunch, dinner and as many snacks as you like, say who's cooking, and share the whole thing with the family.
Add a meal
On a computer, drag a recipe from your cookbook straight onto a day. On a phone, tap a slot and pick one. If the recipe is not in your cookbook yet, just type its name — beanies adds it as a quick recipe you can fill in later.
- Who's cooking — assign a cook; it shows on the meal and in that person's daily briefing (no phone reminder in this version).
- Who's eating — pick family members, and add guests by name for the night someone's over.
- Eating out, leftovers or skipping? — drop one of those in instead of a recipe. No recipe needed.
Mark a meal cooked
Open a planned meal and tap Mark cooked. beanies opens the cook-log so you can give it a quick rating — that entry is saved to the recipe's history, so your cookbook remembers how it went.
Copy a week & share
Had a good week? Tap Copy last week to reuse it — meals and cooks come across, ready to tweak. You can also open any past week from the arrows and copy it forward. Tap Share to send the plan to the family over WhatsApp, Messages or wherever you chat.
- Share: turns the whole week into a friendly one-page picture and sends it on, so you can drop it straight into WhatsApp, Messages or email.
- Export as PDF: makes the same one-page week as a PDF, perfect for printing and sticking on the fridge. In a browser on a computer or tablet it saves the PDF; in the tablet app it opens your share sheet. On a phone only Share shows, as a round icon.
Copying a week replaces whatever was already planned in the target week — beanies warns you first. Anything you'd already marked cooked keeps its history. The picture and PDF are made on your device — nothing about your plan is uploaded to make them, and they always show the whole week (not a single day).
Make a Shopping List for the Week
Tap 🛒 Shopping List at the top of the Meal Planner to turn the week you are looking at into one shopping list. The number on the button is how many recipes it will use. With no recipes planned that week, the button is grayed out.
- One section per recipe, as written. A recipe planned twice in the week is one section. Every ingredient is listed exactly as the recipe has it: beanies never changes an amount. Eating out, leftovers and skipped meals are left out.
- Cook ×N says how many batches. beanies compares how many people are eating at each meal (the family members picked, plus guests) with the number the recipe serves, rounds up to whole batches for each meal, and adds those up. Tacos for 5 on Tuesday and 3 on Friday, from a recipe that serves 4, is 2 batches plus 1: Cook ×3. A recipe with no servings set counts as one batch per meal.
- Nobody picked means everyone. If no one is picked under Who’s eating, the whole family is counted (plus any guests), and the meal shows as “Everyone”.
- Lines end in (×N). Every line of a ×3 recipe ends in “(×3)”, like “8 taco shells (×3)”, so the list still says to buy three lots once it is on the Lists page. A recipe cooked once has no suffix.
- In More Than One Meal. A line that is exactly the same in two recipes (say “1 cup basmati rice”) is put on one line at the top, with the recipes it came from. Its (×N) is the total across those recipes.
- ✨ Find Duplicates. One tap asks magic beans to find the same item written differently, like “500 g ground beef” and “250 g lean ground beef”, and puts them on one line with both amounts. It is free and does not use your magic beans. Only the ingredient lines are sent, and it only groups your lines: it never makes up an amount.
- Split undoes a merge. Tap Split under a merged line to put its lines back in their recipes.
- Review before it is written. Untick what you already have (each section has its own Untick All), change any line, add your own, then choose New List or Add to a List. Adding to a list does not check for doubles, so add before you go shopping.
You can also see a single meal’s ingredients without leaving the planner: open the meal and they are listed under the recipe with that meal’s Cook ×N. Who’s eating starts with everyone picked; tap Clear to pick just some people (it then reads Everyone to pick them all again), and the count updates straight away. Tap Add to put the ingredients on a shopping list; that happens straight away, whether or not you then save the meal.
Want batch counts for your family? Open the recipe, tap edit, and set Servings to the number of people it feeds. Without it, each meal counts as one batch.