A weekly meal plan for a family with picky eaters

Two adults and two kids eat the same dinner every night. Sam's “nothing hot” had to become a list, because Mella's avoids are ingredients. Sam's list names nine: mushrooms, red pepper flakes, sriracha, gochujang, jalapeño, chili pepper, hot sauce, harissa and kimchi.

Each kid in Mella can have their own list of ingredients they won't eat, and those ingredients stay off the plan. We also wanted two meatless dinners in the week.

The week runs from Wednesday, October 7 to Tuesday, October 13. Each night is one dinner for all four of them, and none of the seven uses anything on Sam's list.

A dish with “spicy” in its name

The first plan put Spicy Chickpea Tomato Spinach Stew on Sunday. It's seasoned with smoked paprika and cumin, neither of which is on Sam's list, so nothing kept it off the plan. We swapped it out by hand.

Avoid lists in Mella hold ingredients. There's no “no spicy food” setting, and a dish can still be called spicy because of its spices. So list the ingredients your kid won't eat, and read the week's dinner names before you shop.

Two meatless nights

Mella has no setting for meatless nights, so we got ours by swapping and locking. Swap a night, and when a meatless dinner comes up, lock it so it stays put when you regenerate the rest of the week. A swap picks the next recipe for you, and you can't choose a meatless one, so it can take more than one try.

The seven dinners come down to one list of 32 items to buy, grouped by store section. Produce is 15 of them, then bakery (1), meat and seafood (4), dairy and eggs (2), pantry (7) and canned goods (3).

Ingredients that repeat across nights show up once. Chickpeas are in three dinners, so the list asks for about six cans. Both chicken dinners use boneless skinless thighs, so that's one line for 3 lb. You can check items off as you shop.

The Prep tab turned the week into five tasks, all for Tuesday, the day before the first dinner:

1. Cook and portion white rice for the honey soy stir-fry, the garlic butter shrimp and the pepper steak.
2. Cook the chicken thighs for Wednesday's stir-fry and Thursday's paprika chicken, and refrigerate them separately.
3. Mix the honey soy stir-fry sauce and refrigerate it separately.
4. Cook the steak for Saturday's pepper steak and refrigerate it separately.
5. Mix the pepper steak sauce and refrigerate it separately.

Between them, those tasks give each of the first four dinners a head start.

The week above follows five habits, and none of them needs an app.

1. Cook one dinner. A different dinner for each person turns every night into a short-order shift, so make one meal and let each person build a plate from it.
2. Name the exact ingredients. “Picky” and “nothing spicy” are hard to plan around, but “mushrooms, jalapeño, sriracha” is easy. Write down the ingredients each person won't eat, and check the week against that list once, before you shop.
3. Keep sauces and heat on the side. Put sauces, toppings and anything hot in bowls on the table, so the adults can add heat and the kids can skip it.
4. Have one familiar thing on the table. Rice, potatoes or bread mean nobody goes hungry on a night the main dish doesn't land. Five of this week's seven dinners come with rice, potatoes or pita.
5. Decide the week once. If dinner gets decided at 5 p.m., so does every argument about it. Plan the week ahead, and when a night won't work, swap it for a different dinner instead of cooking a second one. See how Mella works.