Post

MealTime App Intro

Posted Updated
By Kenny Brawner
2 min read

My family has been struggling with making, scheduling and planning nutritious meals since the birth our baby girl. I also had a health scare where I was in the hospital for almost 2 weeks, and that has taxed my wife tremendously. I intend to fix that in the short-term by regaining my strength and helping with more cooking and cleaning, but my mid-to-long term solution for this particular pain point is to fix our planning woes with my mediocre web app skills.

My desired features for this app (subject to change) are:

Needs

  • Weekly views for planning, meal prepping (cook ahead), and just-in-time cooking (cook and eat now or assemble leftovers)
  • Scheduling and notifying about various phases of the process. Sample examples:
    • Weekly planning and grocery list compilation will happen on tuesday evenings at 7pm
    • Weekly grocery store trip or delivery will happen by thursday evenings at 6pm
    • Notifications for long lead-time recipes (e.g. marinading, taking food out of freezer, sourdough prep, etc.)
  • Simple recipe book with ingredient scaling, searching (maybe tags will be good enough for this?)
  • Built-in tags for recipes related to key functionality. i.e. meal-prep friendly or not

Wants

  • Theme night planning and providing dropdown list of stored recipes to automatically place in the correct day
  • Leftover theme that’ll pre-populate with options based on user-supplied input of what meals generated leftovers (and how much)
    • My family typically had 1 or 2 hodge-podge nights where leftovers just got reheated and thrown on the table. Quick and dependable. I want to be able to build that in to the schedule easily.
  • Meal prep reheat instructions from fridge or freezer (user-supplied).
    • I struggle with the best way to reheat and I never remember what I did last time. Microwave, oven, air fryer, stove??? Combination?! Ugh… Attaching it to a recipe that has been tagged as meal-prep friendly will enable easy recall if i don’t make it for a while after.

I’m sure there will be more, but I want to keep it simple for now. I’ve had good luck with flask web apps in the past for my prototyping, so that’s my plan. And shoutout to the indispensable Miguel Grinberg Flask WebApp tutorial. I go through it everytime I make a new one, so that’ll be no different here. Obviously there will be some changes, but I’ll be utilizing it as a basis.

Stay tuned on my progress!

Dev
mealtime app-dev
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.