You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories) and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)
However, I follow a vegetarian diet (as in 95% of my intake is vegetables, legumes and grains), and the generator is having trouble composing meal plans. It says so if you click on Details next to the calorie target. The picked meal plans differ from the carb/fat/protein targets significantly, and the meals are all uncooked: salads, smoothies and deserts. So the vegetarian "menu" doesn't really work, unfortunately.
I thought that the database is severely skewed towards animal-based diets, but if I pick "anything" in the diet menu, I still get mostly salads, sandwitches, scrambled eggs, and stuff like yogurt, nuts, cheese slices, with some meat and eggs here and there of course. What stands out is that most things seem to require very little preparation. Is this tool oriented towards people unexperienced in the kitchen? Or maybe people who don't want to spend time preparing food? That's a nice option to have, but to only have recipes like that is a bit strange. Also, since I was told by a physician I should avoid raw vegetables and eat them well cooked (I used to eat raw or minimally cooked in the past), at least 3/4 of the suggested meals are no-go for me.
You're right that the default settings are pretty skewed towards simple meals. We need to make these options more prominent I think, but if you click the 3-dot menu next to a meal's title, you can change the allowed prep-time and desired "meal complexity".
The meal complexity has a huge impact on what recipes are available, and if you bump a couple meals up to moderate or complex, you'll get a lot more variety. Let me know if that improves things at all for you (I think a lot of the more interesting vegetarian/vegan dishes probably fall under a higher complexity setting).
There's a lot of customizability, but it's been a long-time problem of ours figuring out how to make all the options intuitive to find/use without overwhelming the user. If you dig into it any more, let me know if you have any other feedback!
Some feedback / feature requests: My family is 4 - a 4 yr old and a 1 yr old in the mix. They eat what we eat.
So, I put in one meal for 1800 calories, which is roughly dinner for two adults and half dinner for two toddlers. Ideally, one adult would have enough leftovers for lunch the next day.
The main results I got included egg dishes or oatmeal, so very breakfast heavy. The option to choose meal type would be great!
Planning our family dinners is a significant friction point in our lives - we have a very difficult time thinking about what we will want, getting the food ordered (we primarily do grocery delivery), and getting it on the table quickly (we pick the kids up from care at 6, do the playground, and then quick cook to try to have family dinner 7-730. This resource has so much potential to remove or minimize that friction and I really appreciate it!
At the moment, you can set an integer multiplier on a meal to have it scale up the ingredients (it's the Family Scale setting on the Meal Type). However, it will still be based on your own nutrition targets, and you might want to set it for 3 people and split one serving between your two kids.
If you wanted something more targeted for each of your family members, would it still be appealing to you the planner said something like "You eat one serving, your wife 0.8 servings, and each of your kids 0.4 servings", with some gram weight measurements, or are exact nutrition targets not super important for your needs?
Best of luck!
But I think you'll want to explore cookbooks with two different approaches. I got 2 recommendations...
* Opinionated -- "The Art of Simple Food" by Alice Waters. This is a comprehensive cookbook covering many different recipes with words on technique and lots of background about the ingredients and how to use them effectively. It doesn't make assumptions or gloss over stuff.
* Ingredient-focused -- "Market Cooking" by David Tanis. This focuses on recipes using ingredients that one finds in farmer's markets. I like this approach because it is a smart idea to start with what is good/fresh and available in your location first, and then find recipes for it, than the other way around.
Both of these will give some guidance about what goes with what in terms of flavor and ingredients.
You can also easily search the back catalog of recipes if you don't fancy the current week's meal plan.
I got Perth, Australia, found a restaurant, found the menu, and found this entree: "Chicken Breast filled with Camembert Cheese & Spinach. Served with Mediterranean Vegetables, Pear potatoes, Broccolini & Sun-Dried Tomato Coulis".
Its a y combinator company and does meal planning online. If you have some diet restrictions its useful. I does seem to grocery list/ knows what you should have in stock (digital pantry based on your shopping list). We've been using it a couple years now (after dealing with the overflowing vegetables from a CSA) and its been good. Lost a little weight too.