Digitalization in the kitchen: Without Mealie, I would starve
The open-source tool Mealie helps me enormously with kitchen organization. From within Home Assistant, I use it to manage recipes, plan meals, and create shopping lists almost automatically.
I've been interested in smart kitchen tools for a long time. That's why last autumn I experimented with the "kitchen ERP" Grocy – and failed miserably: too cumbersome, too complex. Then Richie introduced me to the tool Mealie. This is software installed on a local server for organizing recipes and meal plans, as well as easily creating shopping lists.
A first overview convinced me so much that I integrated Mealie as an add-on into my smart home platform Home Assistant. And now, several months later, I can't imagine everyday life without Mealie. Richie recently described the setup on his Unraid server and the import of recipes in his article. However, he hasn't worked much with the shopping list tool yet. I, on the other hand, would starve without the Mealie shopping list and meal planner.
From bureaucratic act to kitchen flow
For Richie, it's the recipe drawer of horror; for me, it's the cookbook stack from hell. And the browser folder with various other online recipes. In short: the recipe chaos makes weekly meal and grocery planning unnecessarily difficult.
At my home, Saturday mornings used to look like this: My dear husband and I would leaf through cookbooks and get inspired. We would choose three to four recipes and note down their names and where to find them, i.e., the link or page number, in a Home Assistant list. This is necessary because there's nothing worse than shopping for certain dishes and then not remembering what the ingredients were for.
And then we enter the ingredients into the highly recommended shopping list app Bring!. This app synchronizes entries on our smartphones and has been a huge help for us when shopping for about ten years. Nevertheless, it's all manual work.
If this procedure gives you bureaucratic vibes, you're not alone. Luckily, Mealie helps: The tool lets me create and cook recipes, create meal plans, and add ingredients to the integrated shopping list.
I enter new recipes on the computer. For meal and grocery planning, I use Mealie with the Home Assistant Companion app on my smartphone or tablet. Scrolling through the recipe database, I constantly discover dishes that haven't been on the table for a long time and that I suddenly crave again. In a matter of seconds, I add a desired recipe to the meal plan for the coming week and let Mealie supplement the shopping list with the necessary ingredients.
Data management: The basis for structured shopping lists
Mealie simply displays the ingredients on the shopping list alphabetically. This is of little use to me in the supermarket: I need the entries sorted by department. This is where data maintenance comes in.
I remember with horror the fiddly work with Grocy, where creating an ingredient and managing it almost required a degree. In Mealie, it's much simpler. If I enter a new recipe, I can immediately add missing ingredients to the database: a name, quantity, and unit of measurement are sufficient. However, to assign new food items to a supermarket department, I have to manually go into data management.
For the shopping list, only the food category and the "available" checkbox are important in the already clear index card next to the food name.
I have stored the supermarket departments as categories. A category can be assigned in the food card via a dropdown menu. Of course, not every supermarket is structured identically. Nevertheless, this pre-sorting saves me a noticeable amount of time when shopping.
Before Mealie puts all ingredients for a recipe on the list, the software displays a review window. I can deselect items I still have in stock there. In the food card, products that I generally have in stock or buy new every week anyway can be marked as "available". Then they are deselected by default in the review dialog when creating the shopping list. If a stock runs low, I simply check the box again and thus send the ingredient along to the list.
Because Mealie, unlike Grocy, is not an inventory management system, I don't have to deal with units of measurement, conversions, and consumption in data management. If I'm in a good mood, I also create aliases or plural names for food items. An alias is useful in multi-person households if one person talks about tangerines and the other about oranges.
Mealie works great in everyday life
When shopping, my husband and I walk through the supermarket with our smartphones in front of our noses and work through the created shopping list. Checking off entries is synchronized in real-time, just like in Bring! – provided there's an internet connection and activated remote access to Home Assistant.
Creating and using the shopping list is so easy that I quickly managed to make the new procedure palatable to my husband. The same applies to the meal planner. With a few taps on the smartphone, a recipe is assigned to a date and – if desired – even to a meal (for example, dinner or lunch). I don't need it that precisely: it's enough for me to know during the week which dishes I bought groceries for on Saturday. The exact planning then depends on time and inclination when the time comes.
I can also add entries to the meal plan that are not stored as recipes in Mealie. For my pizza à la Casa, I don't need instructions, but if I didn't record my planning, I would forget the pizza. For such entries planned only as notes, I have to manually add the ingredients to the shopping list. Missing food entries can also be created directly.
The meal plan data – date, meal names, and their images – can also be displayed in a Home Assistant dashboard or used as variables in push notifications. I haven't implemented that yet, though.
What I still miss in Mealie
Mealie makes my daily organization much easier. With a few improvements, the program would be perfect for me. It's a pity, for example, that when creating a food entry via the shopping list or in the recipe, I don't immediately see the entire index card, but have to go to data management for maintenance. Furthermore, I cannot plan a recipe in the meal plan for several days. In my two-person household, it often happens that we simply eat a four-portion dish over two days. Currently, I then add a recipe twice.
Furthermore, I would like a "Done" function: This would allow a meal to be checked off as prepared and immediately added to the timeline. At the moment, I still do this manually. The timeline shows me when I cooked which dish. This also shows me when I last cooked a recipe: In the recipe overview, I can set the display order so that recipes that haven't been cooked for a long time are displayed first.
But these are minor details. For our household, Mealie is 90 percent exactly what we need to bundle all recipes in one searchable place and use them for weekly organization.
Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.
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