How your meal plan is generated

1. Pick your tags

Tags describe what you want to eat this week. They come in five categories:

• Protein — chicken, beef, fish, tofu, beans.
• Effort — quick, medium, or slow to cook.
• Meal type — breakfast, lunch, dinner.
• Cuisine — Italian, Asian, Mexican, and so on.
• Diet — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, high-protein.

You can also add your own custom tags. Pick any combination — there are no wrong answers.

2. Configure the plan

Tell the generator the basics:

• Days — 2, 4, or 6.
• People — 1 to 4. Drives how much each dish needs to cover.
• Meal types — all three, or just the ones you want generated.
• Max repeat days — how many days a cooked dish should last before rotating. Useful for leftovers.

3. How recipes get matched

This is the part where most apps call an AI and hope for the best. We don't.

CookMeIfYouCan uses a rule-based matching engine. Every recipe in the database is scored against your selected tags. Protein matches weigh heaviest, cuisine and diet tags add a smaller boost, and recipes you've cooked recently get pushed down so you don't see the same dinner every week.

The result is deterministic. The same tags produce plans of the same shape. No randomness masquerading as personalization, no AI hallucinating ingredients that don't belong, no "sorry, try again." You pick the inputs; the engine does the arithmetic.

4. Shopping list, built for you

Once a plan is generated, the shopping list follows automatically. Every ingredient from every meal is collected, grouped by category (produce, pantry, dairy, and so on), and quantities are summed where units line up. Items without a measurable quantity — a pinch of salt, pepper to taste — are kept as notes instead of counted amounts. Tick items off as you shop; the state saves as you go.

5. Save, re-roll, and avoid repeats

If you sign in, your plans are saved and browsable from My Plans. You can favorite recipes and tell the generator to prefer them, ask it to avoid anything you've cooked recently, or re-roll a single meal without regenerating the whole plan.

Signing in is optional. The generator works anonymously too — sign-in just unlocks saving and history.