What's Cookin': Meal Planning From Your Own Repertoire

What's Cookin' exists to answer the most tedious question in any household: what's for dinner? It's a family meal planner built on a deliberately narrow idea: the problem isn't a shortage of recipes, it's the effort of deciding. So the app never suggests anything new. It plans the week entirely from the dishes you already know how to cook.

Recipe apps solve the wrong problem. They hand you thousands of dishes you've never made, which adds research, a shopping list of unfamiliar ingredients and the risk of cooking something badly on a Tuesday night. The actual friction is decision fatigue at 5pm, with a tired family and a fridge you've already looked in twice.

So the unit of the app is your repertoire, a library of the dishes you personally cook, each with its ingredients, an optional recipe and any notes worth remembering. Once that library exists, planning a week stops being a creative act and becomes a few taps. Nothing to learn, nothing to look up.

The planner shows Monday to Sunday at a glance with today highlighted. Tap a day, choose a meal category, pick a dish, and it lands on that day as a removable chip labelled with its meal. The flow is deliberately two-step: choosing a day shows only the dishes you know for that category, with a quick-pick carousel of suggestions above them, so the common case is a single tap.

One decision shaped the whole flow: you cannot create a dish while planning. Adding to your repertoire lives in the Library, separately. It would have been easy to let people add a new dish mid-plan, but that turns a thirty-second task into an open-ended one, the exact friction the app exists to remove. Planning stays a picking exercise; building the library is its own deliberate activity.

The library groups your dishes into four categories, named for the moment rather than the meal: Morning Essentials, Mid-Day Fuel, Main Courses and Small Plates. Search runs live across both dish names and ingredients, which quietly answers the question people actually have: you've got prawns to use up, or half a bunch of basil, and you want to know what you already make that uses them.

Adding a dish captures prep time, servings, category, a dynamic ingredient list, notes, and either a written recipe or a pasted link for the ones you follow from elsewhere. Dishes you create take an emoji cover over a tinted gradient rather than demanding a photograph, so building the library never stalls on not having a good picture.

Meal planning is rarely one person's job, even when it falls to one person. The family layer lets everyone join a shared account and flag what they'd like that week: if Cici wants pesto pasta on Thursday, it arrives in the planner as a suggestion you accept with one tap, and you know to pick up basil.

It's a small mechanic that changes the dynamic. Requests become part of the plan instead of an interruption at the stove, and the person doing the cooking gets advance warning rather than a negotiation.

The interface is light and quiet: a soft grey ground, white cards with generous corner radii and gentle shadows, a single fresh green accent, and the system typeface so it reads as native on the phone it's used on. Dish photography carries the colour, and the layout gets out of its way. This is an app opened for ninety seconds while doing something else, so nothing competes for attention.

I designed the screens in Figma first and built the prototype to match. It installs to a home screen as a progressive web app, which is the right shape for something you reach for standing in the kitchen with one hand.