Take the pain out of weekly meal planning

Published: Sunday, Jul 24, 2022
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I bet you can relate to the above image.

And of course, this only get harder once you have kids and can’t just eat cereal or soup for dinner every night.

I wanted a simple tool that would let me plan my meals for the week before I went grocery shopping so I would know what to buy at the store and what not to.

I didn’t need a tool that made me pay for meal suggestions or gave me pre-built meal plans that were full of recipes that my family wouldn’t eat. I know what my family likes and I know what I like. I just need a way to organize and plan it. Sadly, none of the tools out there fit the bill, so I made my own.

Introducing the Simple Weekly Meal Planner.

The Simple Weekly Meal Planner is free and very straightforward. You add your meals and what ingredients they each include. Then each week you select for each day what meal you want to have. The app will generate a grocery list for you to take to the store to ensure you buy all the ingredients you need. That’s it. As the label says on the tin, simple.

Screenshots

Adding Meals

Simple Weekly Meal Planner

Planning your Week

Simple Weekly Meal Planner

Technical bits

Svelte Logo

On a more geeky note, this was my first foray into the world of Svelte. My interest in Svelte was piqued by the State of Javascript report that showed Svelte had one of the highest developer satisfaction rates, even more than React or Vue. I was also intrigued by the new SvelteKit framework that was touted by the Svelte community. After having built Simple Weekly Meal Planner with both, I can say that much of the hype is real. Coming from React, building with Svelte simplifies a lot of the rough edges and makes me feel very productive. There are a few things which work differently that took some getting used to, but it doesn’t take long to adjust. It was easy to integrate Firebase into the Svelte code to power Simple Weekly Meal Planner. Stay tuned for a more detailed, follow-up post on my technical lessons learned.