My weekly meal planning workflow

2025-12-15

I like to cook. It might be one of the few things I enjoy doing that I will keep enjoying now matter how much I do it. I think it's also because I like eating. I'm proficient enough that once I cook something once (or a couple times) I don't need to look at a recipe anymore. However, I have two issues that until recently I never figured out.

  1. I can never remember what to buy when I'm in the store. I constantly have to make trips to the grocery store for 1 or 2 ingredients throughout the week. Very frustrating.
  2. Once I find something I like, I cook it constantly. This is not actually the problem. The problem is that once I move out of that phase of cooking the same dish over and over I forget about it. Then I never remember to come back to it!

Finally, I've figured out a way to solve both of these problems! A while back I stumbled across cooklang, which is a structured text format for recipes. I like this because it is pure text. Cooklang is designed to allow you to write a recipe and embed the ingredients along the way. The cooklang command line tool will take a bunch recipe files, parse out all the ingredients, and compile a list of everything you need to make them. This solves problem #1 since now I can just choose the recipes I will cook during the week and get a list of things to buy. Even better this also solves problem number #2 since now I have a list of recipes I know how to cook so I don't forget any.

It turns out there are apps that already do this. I looked through the most popular and they seem to have the major features that I would need. I'm a little bit annoyed that they charge a subscription for most of the good features, but I still think I should give them a try. My shell script workflow is nice, but it requires me to be at my computer and is a bit clunky (every week I copy over the previous week's shell script and use it as a template). If I find that there's an app that fits my needs at a price I'm willing to pay I'll post about it. If not, maybe I need to make an app for my needs I should have realized that the developers of cooklang already made an app. It seems to do exactly what I need for free. Aaaaaaaaahhhhh! All this time. Well at least writing out this post helped me find it.