Three years ago, I wrote a post about how our family plans meals each week on Google Calendar where I used a data export to surface and share some of our favorite weeknight dinners.
Until this month, that was still our planning process. Each week, we’d drop recipes into calendar events, duplicating past meals that worked, adding new recipes that included current sale items and ingredients we needed to use up. It was simple, flexible, and it kept our weekly plan accessible everywhere.
After over 8 years of adding and duplicating recipes, I started asking myself questions that a calendar search couldn’t answer, like:
- How many times have we actually cooked each meal?
- Are there any old gold recipes that we made a few times and forgot about?
- What can we make right now with what we already have?
- Can we make grocery planning faster without scanning every recipe?
How to get our middle-schoolers to eat more leafy green things?
What we really needed was a database, and that’s what I initially set out to build when I exported our shared calendar data again and started tinkering with Claude Code. After cleaning out a lot of noise and resolving duplicates, I realized we had over 70 unique recipes, several of which we’d made over 40 times. I didn’t want to replace our calendar-based process. I wanted to augment it.
As I dug in and started shaping my plan for a progressive web app, I realized I was building something that any household could pick up and use. I purchased the skilletsched.com domain on April 8th and iterated my way to a lightweight, useful, and accessible application. Using my own household as the primary alpha tester, it’s already been a big time saver for managing recipes, planning weekly meals, and creating a shopping list. It also supports 2-way sync with Google Calendar (Outlook and iCal coming soon), so we can still access our meal plans anywhere our family calendar is available. My favorite part of this project has been adding features like a full-screen recipe cook view, public recipe sharing, dark/light mode theming, and even an MCP server for recipe management and meal planning in your favorite LLM.
Time for a taste test!
While it’s shaped around how our family plans, I hope that it’ll make recipe management and meal planning easier for anyone. If you already have some kind of meal planning system (or even if you don’t), I’d love for you to give SkilletSched a try and let me know what works for you, what doesn’t, and what’s missing. Bon appétit!
This sounds awesome! Sure wish I had something like this while raising a family and working in the 80’s and 90’s.