Omnom

I like a little bit of friction in my life. I really do.

I like writing things down by hand,

I like reading long physical books,

I like taking the time to get my pasta sauce to the right consistency, constantly tossing and agitating the pan watching it emulsify into creamy, starchy, goodness.

I like cooking.

What I do not like is the mental gymnastics of figuring out what to eat.

I decided this was friction that drained me, and built something for my partner and me that would make the whole meal planning process a little more fun and a little less decision-fatiguey. There were 3 questions we hated answering each week:

• What do we actually like to make?
• What do we want to eat today?
• What groceries do we need for the week?

That got us to our wishlist:

• See all the meals we like to make in one big list,
• choose from that list to build a weekly meal-plan,
• and auto-generate a grocery list based on those meals.

Yayyy my first real, painful software-shaped problem I could throw at Claude Code.

But first, design. I went down a little design rabbit-hole late last year so I used my new figma skills to design the screens. I wanted it to be minimalistic, with a single accent color. I chose 2 fonts, a cute serif for the logo font and a clean sans serif for the primary font and that was it.

V1 (Anil’s Kitchen iykyk) was functional and lasted us a while but it was a little dull. What you’re seeing below is V2. It’s kinda cute, and it does the job pretty well. What used to take us 30 minutes and sooo much mental energy takes us 5. And it’s fun :)

Some things I’d like to add in the future:

• Omnom takes the link to a recipe (youtube video, blog post, etc) and creates the meal, adding all the ingredients from the source
• Templates for weeks? Set meal plans based on my mood for the week: experimental, lazy, fun, health-forward. Also would be nice to repeat weeks.

For now though, it’s a happy kitchen.