Meals

A week you can actually cook from, split into three focused apps: Meal plan
for the week, Recipes for things you've saved, and Shopping for what to
get and what is already in your kitchen. They work together, but each has one
clear job.

Say "help me plan dinners this week", "what are we eating Thursday?", or "plan meals around what's in the fridge", and it opens as an app in the web chat. See Apps for how apps work generally.

The week

Which week you get. Asking to "plan dinners this week" starts with tonight and runs through Sunday — so a plan you ask for on a Tuesday covers Tuesday onward, not the following Monday. Ask for "next week" and you get the Monday-to-Sunday one after this. If there are only a night or two left in this week, Pepper covers those and carries straight on into the next, so the plan always begins with the meal you're about to cook.

Meal plan shows each day and its meals. A meal can be something you're cooking, a night you're eating out, or a night you're skipping — the last two count for the shopping list exactly as much as they should, which is nothing.

Ask for changes in plain language and they land on the page:

• "Make Wednesday something faster."
• "We're out Friday now."
• "Swap the salmon for something the kids will eat."
• "Plan around what I've got."

Pepper knows roughly how much room each evening has, because it reads your calendar — a 90-minute roast on a night you're out until eight is worse than no plan, since it looks like it was thought about. It only counts things that actually overlap the meal: a 9am standup says nothing about dinner, and an all-day marker like a birthday doesn't block your evening on its own.

Cooking one

Tap a meal and Pepper writes out how to make it — the ingredients with amounts, the steps in order with timers where they matter, and a line saying where the recipe came from. It's written on demand, so you get it for the meal you're standing in front of rather than for the whole week at once.

On an Apple Watch, the same thing lives under Walkthroughs → Recipes: one step at a time, one big Next, and a timer per step where the recipe gave one. A cooking timer keeps running when the app closes and taps your wrist when it's up — allow notifications for Pepper on the iPhone's Watch app, or the countdown only works while you're looking at it. A recipe saved as a bare link or a photo has no text to read steps from, and the watch says so rather than making some up. Or send it straight there: open the recipe here and press Walk through on Apple Watch. See The Apple Watch app.

Shopping

The list comes from the meals you're cooking, consolidated across the week rather than repeated per night. Tick things off as you go — it's built for holding in one hand in a shop.

Add something by hand with the field above the list — for anything that isn't coming from a planned meal, like paper towels or a birthday candle. If it's already on the list and unticked, Pepper won't add a second line for it.

Items you already have something for are marked as such, from what Pepper knows about your kitchen. It won't quietly delete them; it tells you, and you decide. Open Already have in Shopping to see the underlying kitchen lists.

Update this week rewrites the plan around the meals you've already cooked, and the shopping list is rewritten with it. Anything you'd already ticked off stays ticked if the new plan asks for it again — it's marked kept, saying which line it came from, because Pepper matches those by name and can get it wrong. Untick it if it did. Planning next week doesn't carry ticks over: that's a different shop, and by then you've probably eaten it.

Asking Pepper in chat does the same thing as pressing the button. Which week the new plan is for decides whether your ticks come across, not how you asked for it — so "redo this week without the salmon" keeps what's already in your bag, and "plan me next week" starts from a clean list. Pepper reads that off the dates in the plan it just wrote, against today where you are.

What's in the kitchen

Send a photo of a shelf, a fridge, or the freezer and Pepper reads it into your kitchen list — one list per place, so "the pantry" and "the freezer" stay separate. You can also just tell it ("we've got a lot of rice and two tins of chickpeas").

Two things worth knowing:

• It records what it actually sees, hedges included — "about half a block of feta", "something in a green jar, label facing away". A guess dressed up as a fact is worse than a hedge.
• Things age out. A list that only ever grows stops describing a kitchen and becomes a history of one, so Pepper drops items once they've plausibly been used or gone off, based on what kind of thing they are. Photograph the shelf again whenever you want it re-read; the new photo simply replaces the old reading of that place.

Swapping an ingredient

Ask what you could use instead of something — "what can I use instead of garlic?" — and Pepper offers a few ranked alternatives on the page, each with a reason and what it does to the cost.

Choosing is a tap, not another sentence, and you choose the scope: just this meal, or everywhere it appears this week. That's the part that decides whether a shopping item disappears, which is why it's a button rather than something you have to remember to say.

Anything you change comes back with a line saying what changed and how to undo it.

Recipes

Recipes are your own saved items (see Artifacts), not records locked into a special recipe database. The Recipes app is a shelf over those artifacts, and the plan can point at them. Ask Pepper to save one and it keeps the actual ingredients and method, with the source link on top.

Sending a link works when the site allows it; plenty of recipe sites refuse automated readers, and when that happens Pepper says which one wouldn't let it in. Pasting the text or sending a screenshot always works.

Good to know

• Your meals also show up on your Calendar app's agenda, alongside your commitments, so a day's shape is in one place. See Calendar.
• Nothing here is shared. Your plan, recipes, list and kitchen are yours alone.
• Over text message, WhatsApp or email you get the written answer rather than the screen — you can still plan, shop and ask what's in the kitchen. See Ways to reach Pepper.

Things to try

• Plan around the week you actually have. Dinners can be planned around your real week, so the long roast doesn't land on the night you're out until eight — "plan dinners this week, we're out Friday" — and the shopping list builds itself from the plan.
  Try it: "Help me plan dinners this week, we're out Friday"
• Cook from what's in the fridge. A photo of your fridge or pantry is enough for Pepper to know what's in the kitchen; then "plan around what I've got" makes dinners out of it.
• The list is at home. Standing in the store and the list is at home? Text the Pepper number shown in Settings "what's on my shopping list?" and you get it back, built from the week's meal plan.
• Out of an ingredient. Halfway through a recipe and out of something? "What can I use instead of buttermilk?" gets an answer from what's likely in your kitchen.
  Try it: "What can I use instead of buttermilk?"