The Premium subscription plan includes access to the leftovers feature, which is a great way to simplify grocery lists and prepare fewer meals when you have less time to cook.

To enable leftovers on the website, open the left sidebar of the site by clicking the menu button at the top and go to Meal Settings > Leftovers. On the mobile app, you can go into Preferences in the lower right to find the Leftovers option. You'll just need to toggle on the option to Use Leftovers Patterns ('Enable leftovers' on the app), and then you can get started creating patterns for repeating meals throughout your weekly meal plans.

As you modify leftovers patterns on the website, a visual preview will update to show you how the leftovers will be used throughout the week. You can have as many leftovers patterns as you like, but a meal can only be linked with a single leftovers pattern at a time.

Alternating Patterns

If you need to set up a more complex pattern with alternating days or otherwise restrict your leftovers to certain days of the week, you can add new meals to customize this in your meal layout. In the below example, Leftovers Dinner A and Leftovers Dinner B are two new meals that have been added to alternating days in the layout. With a leftovers pattern set for each, those leftovers will be generated for alternating days instead of automatically flowing forward to the next day of the week. You can see more about editing your meal layout here: Customizing the number of meals and layout

Note: The 'How many days should you prepare for?' option counts each day of the week rather than the number of occurrences for that meal. In order for Monday's leftovers meal to generate leftovers for Friday in the above example, the number of days must be set to 4 or more. If this were set to 2, the leftovers would only extend through Wednesday. (This is something we do hope to make a bit more inuitive as we further develop things).

Tips:

- The 'How many recipes to prepare?' option indicates the number of dishes that will be planned for these leftovers meals. Setting this to 1 will only generate a single main dish for these meals, while setting this to 2 or more will allow the generator more flexibility to include side dishes and overall improved variety for these meals.

- If you need to create leftovers for a manual meal entry outside of your automatic leftovers patterns, select the three-dot menu icon for the food in your planner, and use the "Create leftovers" option. This can also be used to create leftovers that carry over from one week to another, which cannot currently be done with the automatic patterns.

tags: no cooking, leftover foods, batch cooking, less groceries, meal types