There are so many recipes on the internet. Most of them fall somewhere between a search engine optimized mom-blog post and a high school science experiment. Scroll beyond a story about the author’s great grandmother harvesting maize for an eloté corn salad and you’ll find a non-specific ingredients list, some half assed instructions, and a predictably useless comment section. If you’re lucky there’s a video showing each of the steps that is as highly produced as it is unhelpful.

Every once in a while you get lucky. You type “best meatloaf recipe” or “healthy fried chicken” into Google and find something that looks good. You make it, and you like it. There are a few things you think to adjust to your liking next time, but you’d follow the recipe again. Maybe you add it to your browser “Favorites”, forever lost to the sands of time. If you were born before 1990, you might even write it down on a piece of paper. Most likely you just do the dishes and carry on with your life.

A month later you type “best meatloaf recipe” into Google and see one of the links is purple. “Oh that one was good!”, you think to yourself. You click on it, close the 953 popups, scroll past the ads, scroll past the shitty blog post, close the newsletter signup popup that was on a 15 second timer, and find the actual recipe. You follow the instructions, make the same mistakes you did last time, and have the same ideas for improvements you did last time. You do the dishes and carry on with your life, destined to repeat this dance again in a month or two. This is fine, so long as you don’t care about making and eating good food.

The best recipes are crafted over time. They’re refined over generations and memorialized in family cookbooks, hand-me-down pieces of paper, or the minds of their creators. They are based in a culture, use local ingredients, and stand for something.

Meal Plan Menu is dedicated to helping you eat healthier and spend less on food by planning your meals. I built it for myself and my family, and I hope you find it useful.

— Chance