Meals and recipes

The week

Meals shows the week in meal slots: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, unless you change them. Choose an empty spot, or Add meal, and pick a recipe from the box or type what it is. A slot can hold more than one meal, and each can be for some of the family.

The Plan menu saves time:

• Repeat last week copies last week’s meals into this one, beside anything already there.
• Save week as template keeps this week’s meals as a template, and Apply a template adds one to any week.
• Meal slots renames, recolours, hides, or adds slots.

When you add a meal, Not had lately suggests favourites nobody has planned or made for a few weeks. How long counts as a while is in Settings → Household. With AI turned on, Ask AI for ideas suggests a few more, from the household’s preferences and its box.

The recipe box

The recipe box keeps the household’s recipes, with their photos, times, servings, ingredients, and steps. Search it, or filter by tag, favourites, or what you haven’t made lately. A recipe’s page scales its ingredients to the servings you choose, keeps the household’s notes and rating, and logs each time it was made with Made it.

Adding recipes

Choose Add recipe. While an admin has turned on Add recipes from links in Settings → Household, it asks for a link first: paste one from a recipe site and choose Get recipe. Most recipe sites publish their recipes in a form Lantern reads, and a TikTok post’s caption works too. A page without a recipe opens the form with what Lantern could find, to finish by hand.

You can also choose Type it in instead and write one in. Each ingredient and step goes on its own line, and a line ending in a colon starts a section.

An admin can bring a whole recipe box over from Mealie or Tandoor in Settings → Household, under importing a recipe box.

Cooking

Cook opens a recipe full screen, a step at a time, with the ingredients beside it to tick off. The screen stays on while you cook, even on a wall display at night.

Shopping for it

Add week to groceries puts the ingredients of the week’s recipes on the Grocery list, combining the same thing from different recipes. You see the list first and choose what to add: what you probably have already, like salt and oil, starts unticked. A basket beside each day does the same for one day, and Add to grocery list on a recipe for just that one.