Once you have a few recipes saved in Mealie, you can plan your meals and generate shopping lists.
Planning meals
- Open Mealie and click Meal Planner in the sidebar
- You'll see a calendar view — click a day to add a recipe
- Search or browse your saved recipes and select one
- Repeat for each day/meal you want to plan
You can plan breakfast, lunch, and dinner separately, or just pick one meal per day — it's flexible.
Shopping lists
Mealie has a built-in shopping list feature:
- Click Shopping Lists in the sidebar
- Create a new list
- You can add items manually, or add all ingredients from a recipe with one click
When you add ingredients from multiple recipes, Mealie combines duplicates — if two recipes need onions, you'll see one entry with the total amount.
Scaling servings
On any recipe page, you can adjust the number of servings and all ingredient quantities update automatically. Handy when cooking for more (or fewer) people than the recipe was written for.