Recipe Book, Meal Scheduler, Grocery List

[Patrick_Ford1]

Hi everyone,

Originally I started making this for my wife, but she decided to use another app instead so I figured I would finish it out and share it.

https://airtable.com/shrXDCU2NXyGNLVV5

Summary

This base is designed to hold recipes and then use those recipes to schedule meals and create shopping lists using the IFTTT applet with the trigger “When a new record is created in view”.

It’s a great way to keep track of recipes you like. The meal planner uses a simple form view so that you can choose existing recipes and then the date on which you want to make them. The shopping list view takes what meals you have scheduled and looks up the ingredients. This view only shows what meals are within the next week, but if you shop more or less than once a week, you can adjust accordingly in the filter. While the shopping view shows the ingredients for each recipe, you can use IFTTT or Zapier to create a shopping list using ToDoIst or other listing app to create a compiled shopping list. This is especially useful since Airtable only supports Grid view on the Airtable app. It makes shopping a breeze. Then, at the end of each shopping trip, simply delete the list, and the process starts over, without any adjustment to Airtable.

Feel free to copy and customize the base to suit your needs as it’s built based on my preferences.

If you have any questions or suggestions on how to make this Base better, please reply or email me! I’m always open to questions or improvements!

Thanks!

[Jessica_Joy]

Looks nice! This is pretty close to what I am attempting to make. I am stalled at one point. Just trying to pull in ingredients, but mine is made a bit different. I thought it was going well until I hit the grocery list from ingredients. Would you be able to share your base to be copied? Thank you!

[Patrick_Ford]

Certainly! I agree the ingredients part is a little frustrating. I used a long text field, but I wish Aritable would come out with a List Field Type. That way the list can easily be parsed in Zapier to create lists in other apps. You can do that now, but it’s far too complicated. Anyway, I’m glad you found this helpful! Here’s the link:

Airtable

Meal Planner - Airtable

Explore the "Meal Planner" base on Airtable.

[Jessica_Joy]

thank you so much Patrick!

[Y_K]

I’d be interested in knowing WHY your wife didn’t want to use this - was it she didn’t know where to click? having to scroll vertically to access different fields? not understanding the ‘linked record’ concept?

I am constantly building bases for my family and colleagues, some worked well and some didn’t. I learned that although they ‘get’ the concepts it often requires too much mental effort for them to keep using the bases (forgetting how to get to that particular view, easier just to send a chat message to people than updating the records…)

Painful to see users abandoning these well designed bases…

[Patrick_Ford1]

@Y_K It’s a shame for sure, but I think for her it was just a complexity thing. She wanted to have a simple solution that she didn’t have to think about in the rush of the day, which I understand. I have fun designing bases anyway though so I’m not too hurt.

I definitely can relate with you though.

[Mary_Williams]

If this is a ‘duh’ question, please be kind. I’m just learning.

Can Airtable integrate to Evernote, to link the recipes to your database?

All my recipes are in Evernote; even photo scans of recipes can be searched by the text in the photo.

[Patrick_Ford1]

@Mary_Williams Airtable does not do this natively, however you can typically do this with Zapier or IFTTT or Integromat.

[Calum_Kennedy]

This is just what I have been looking for.
I am new to IFTTT - Assuming you used ToDoist to take the outputs - did you manage to get it to the point where it displays the ingredients that you need to buy in a list rather than as a list of hyperlinks back to Airtable for each recipe?

[Patrick_Ford]

I’ve been playing around with text formatters and parsers, but I just don’t know that much about them yet to have it parse the items into a cohesive list format. I can get it to send me an email with all the ingredients, but they aren’t separated, bulleted, or anything.