3 min read

Fill a week of dinners from your own recipes

A short video of Harvenna filling an empty week from the recipes you already cook, in one tap, on every plan.

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The hardest part of planning a week is the blank page. You know twenty things your family will eat, but on a Sunday night you can only think of three of them, and two were last week.

Here’s what the video shows, in the iPhone app:

  1. An empty week. Next week has nothing planned yet, so the planner offers to fill it.
  2. Tap “Fill from my recipes”. Every night gets a dinner, picked from the recipes in your own library.
  3. Narrow it to dinners. This household also has a usual breakfast and lunch for each person, which fill in too, so the video filters the day to dinner to show one meal a night.
  4. Flick through the week. A different dinner each night, Monday to Friday.

It isn’t random. It leans away from what you’ve had lately, mixes up cuisines and proteins, puts the quicker recipes on the nights you’ve marked as busy, and favours dinners that cover what the week is short of or share ingredients with the rest of it. Run it again on another week and you get a different set. If your library is small, it repeats a dinner rather than leaving a night empty, and spaces the repeats out.

Two things the video doesn’t show. Any night you don’t like, swipe the dinner left and tap Swap to choose something else yourself. And if some recipes should never be picked for you (the Christmas ham, the three-hour ragu), switch on a tag for them in Settings and filling will leave them alone. A week that already has some dinners in it has “Fill empty nights” in its menu, which keeps what you chose and fills only the gaps. On the web, the same button is on an empty week.

Which plan

Filling a week from your own recipes is on every plan, the free one included. It isn’t AI, so it still works when an AI allowance has run out.

The rough cost beside each dinner in the video comes from the household’s scanned receipts, and receipt scanning is on the Family plan. Having AI plan the week instead is on the Personal and Family plans.

For how to set up a week that is actually cookable, read planning a week of dinners without the 5pm decision.

Harvenna plans your family’s week from the recipes you already cook, turns it into one shopping list, and keeps track of what the food cost. Free to plan by hand.