[showsover]

One app I haven't seen mentioned here yet is Paprika (https://www.paprikaapp.com/). I use it as a general storage for recipes that I tried and like as it's really easy to strip the entire lifestories you find in online recipes. It has a shopping list functionality as well as week planning.

The only downside is that it's quite pricey as you have to buy it seperately on each platform (ios, android, mac, pc). Personally I just have the ios version that works on both phone and tablet and use a browser bookmarklet to import recipes from my pc.

[srazzaque]

I'd also recommend giving Paprika a try. In the grand scheme of things it's "expensive" if you are used to free apps, but a small percentage of a typical grocery cost.

Whilst it has some UI quirks, you can tell its quite well thought out and nicely modelled. The cloud sync also works well between my wife and I (as mentioned by another comment).

Some niceties:

- Grocery list additions automatically get categorised by "Aisle" (e.g if you add "apples" it goes into "produce"). This makes shopping easier, as similar items are grouped.

- Recipes have ingredients, which can be selectively populated into your grocery list. Then, when you're looking down the list it maintains that "link" (ie I'm buying bread crumbs for xyz recipe), which is a +1 over pen and paper. This means if my wife gives me a list, but I cannot find an item, I'll at least know what that item was intended for so I can substitute.

[justusthane]

It can also do exactly what OP is looking for by creating a "menu" and then adding it to the calendar whenever you want to repeat it.

[alexchro93]

+1 for Paprika

It's great. Easily saves most recipes online. Allows you to tag them. You can schedule meals far out in advance from you personal recipe collection. From these scheduled meals you can create a shopping list.

I bought both the mobile and desktop (Windows) version. My fiance and I spend about 10 minutes a week discussing what we'd like to eat for the next 5-7 days. From there I schedule the meals in the app and, boom, I've got a shopping list. Super easy. I've put a lot of recipes from cook books in to the app.

We only use it for dinners and deserts, as breakfast and lunch are more predictable and repeatable.

Edit: another thing I like is that the app doesn't (yet, i think) require a subscription. to use it, after a trial period, is a one time payment

[lucretian]

how do you get cookbooks recipes into the app? manual transcription or something easier / more efficient, i hope?

[thex10]

There's an in-app web browser, and you can click "download" on most recipes from most websites and it will automatically parse the recipe (you can edit where needed) and save it to your recipes. It works perfectly without intervention from my part virtually all the time.

They also offer a bookmarklet (anyone remember those?), which I remember working well in Safari.

[lucretian]

yeah, i saw that. i'm interested in how to transcribe paper recipes. i have a lot of cookbooks that i under-utilize at time of meal planning b/c they're captured in a "dumb" format, and I don't want to page through 15 books every weekend.

[klokovoz]

I recommend googling "name of cookbook" "name of recipe" and then you can usually find some blog post that took that recipe and "adapted" it, which usually means they just took the original and wrote a blog story around it.

[mjakefranklin]

I type them in manually, and bought the desktop version specifically to make this easier. It's painful, but since there's decent data export options, I'll hopefully never have to do it again

[IanCal]

These days it's pretty easy on a phone. I take a picture with google lens and copy the text.

Easier is finding the same recipe on their website and importing that directly.

[lucretian]

helpful, thanks. seems like it still needs an extra step. i was hoping that the paprika app had this native functionality so you can scan right into the app (i'm not a tech guy but i assume that there are OCR APIs out there...?)

[joshstrange]

Paprika is an amazing app and worth every penny. I don't think people realize how much extra stress/cognitive load using recipes right off a website takes, why would they when they've never known anything else? Having all your recipes be in the exact same format, updatable as you learn what works/doesn't in a recipe, and easy access to tools like scaling in a consistent way feels like a super power. Add in meal planning and the grocery list feature (adding everything for a recipe to your list is super easy and you can just uncheck the stuff you already have when adding) and it's a powerhouse.

[pratyushag2]

Love Paprika for meal planning, saving recipes (and eating them), allows for easy modifications of recipe as well as web imports, and great interface for groceries. Definitely worth the price.

[thebricklayr]

Paprika is great. I’d much rather pay once upfront than for a subscription.

However, one thing that makes Paprika a no-go for our family is its inability to make shared collections of recipes, grocery lists, and meal plans. My wife and I want to cook together. We want to tweak our family recipes over time and share a single grocery list and meal plan between us.

Paprika can’t do that, and no other app comes close to Paprika in terms of features and payment model.

So, I’ve started building my own: Umami (https://www.umami.recipes).

Currently it’s just being used by my family and friends, but it’s starting to get to the point where I think other people might like to use it, so if you try it out please let me know what you think!

It supports shared collections of recipes and will soon have shared grocery lists and meal plans as well.

[IanCal]

> My wife and I want to cook together. We want to tweak our family recipes over time and share a single grocery list and meal plan between us.

Unless you want fine grained control over this (what to share, what not to share) then paprika supports this just fine. It syncs between multiple devices so you can just add more - that's what I do.

[thebricklayr]

Are you just sharing the same login? I suppose that works, but it’s not ideal, especially for things like sharing a collection of cocktail recipes with my friends (which I’m actually doing now with Umami).

I just checked Paprika again. There is no way to share a folder/category of recipes with someone else. Sharing each recipe individually is not really what I want to be doing either.

[thex10]

I'm not the previous poster, but just wanted to chime in that my husband and I just share a login and yeah, it works. Good enough for us! But Paprika definitely doesn't lend itself to sharing multiple recipes with others in any efficient manner.

[jihadjihad]

It looks great so far, thanks for building this. I think this will really streamline how my recipes are stored on my phone (iBooks PDFs, screenshots in iCloud, bookmarks, etc.). Recipe sites have really gone downhill with all the ads and life stories...I just want to cook dinner!

[thebricklayr]

Thanks for giving it a try!

> Recipe sites have really gone downhill with all the ads and life stories...I just want to cook dinner!

Couldn’t agree more. I think having a way to import recipes without the fluff is a table stakes feature for any recipe app (and was the very first part of it I built).

[hansbo]

It also works if you are more than one. Me and my wife have used it for several years now to sync shopping lists between us, to great effect.

[loufe]

One thing I found frustrating when I went on my own journey trying to find a platform like this for my partner and I a year ago was that NONE of these apps (Paprika included) worked with MicroG installed on my Android phone. If anyone has news regarding this having changed I would be ecstatic.

[brocket]

I understand not supporting Linux but they don't even have a web version which is a deal breaker for me.

[leokennis]

I like Paprika but it’s edging very close to abandonware territory.

Personally I switched to https://crouton.app but that won’t work if you’re on Windows.

[sh4rks]

Where has this app been my whole life...