Weekly Dinner Meal Plan Generator from Mealie

This n8n workflow streamlines meal preparation by automatically generating a weekly dinner plan. Triggered every Friday at 8pm, it fetches recipes from your self-hosted Mealie instance—optionally filtered by category—then uses custom code to randomly select a configurable number of unique recipes, ensuring no duplicates for variety.

The selected recipes are then posted to Mealie's API to populate a meal plan starting on a specified future day (e.g., today or next week). Key configurations include the number of recipes, plan offset days, category ID, and Mealie base URL, all set via a dedicated Config node for easy customization.

Benefits include significant time savings on meal planning, promotion of recipe diversity to prevent boredom, and seamless integration with Mealie for a centralized recipe management system. Ideal for busy households, health-conscious users, or anyone maintaining a recipe database, it reduces decision fatigue and encourages cooking from existing recipes.

Setup is straightforward: add your Mealie API token to credentials, adjust the schedule and config as needed, and activate. Perfect for lifestyle automation enthusiasts looking to optimize weekly routines with minimal effort.