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This demo shows how to use a "Goal Food" search system to find recipes by ingredients and plan meals.

Tier: free

You don't need to pay for notion to do this.

The core concept is having a singular recipe in your recipes database that serves as an “index”, and connecting your calendar events to that recipe index. A paid plan can help make sure all recipes are connected to the index, but it's also easy to do manually

Usage

visual demo of working with the

1. Add recipes to the Recipes database with their ingredients

2. The All Recipes index page must be related to every recipe

   You can enforce this with a database automation (when items created → relate them to “recipe index”), or a default DB template, or a filtered database view

3. Create an entry in the Meal Calendar

4. Enter a goal food (e.g., "eggs" or "eggs tomato") for the meal calendar entry

5. The Meal Options formula will automatically update to only show recipes containing those ingredients

6. Click the "Select Meal(s)" button to “freeze” your meal selections for this entry.

   this adds all the meal options, allowing you to repeat steps 4-6 to place multiple meals on a day. you might choose to “replace” if you only want one meal per calendar entry

7. (optional) Delete your goal food text and the meal options will disappear, leaving only your selected meals. 🧼 clean!

Demo

Meal Calendar

Recipes

Groceries

Appendix

The “Meal Options” formula

This formula uses the “recipe index” relation (which is itself related to all recipes) to allow you to search through all your recipes for your goal food.