I’ve been playing with Mealie recently. It’s a recipe manager, so you store all of the recipes that you have saved from various web sites and search them easily. You can also add your own recipes, including photos, and include a star rating.
Mealie isn’t the first recipe manager that I’ve used. Until now, I’ve used Mela as a recipe manager. Mela was developed by the same developer as Reeder, which I use for RSS feeds. Mela is really well-designed, and I’ve used it happily for three years, but it’s for Apple devices only. Whilst I use an iPhone and an iPad, I don’t use an Apple desktop anymore and Christine has an Android phone, so I’ve been looking for a cross-platform replacement.
Installing Mealie
Mealie is self-hosted. That means that it runs on a device that you own, rather than a web service, so you’ll need a spare device that’s always on to run it. A Raspberry Pi should be fine, and indeed that’s what I’m using. The other requirement is that the device runs Docker – again, I already had Docker up and running on my Raspberry Pi. If you use Home Assistant, you can install Mealie as an add-on.
There are two versions of Mealie, with different database storage systems. The easiest to set up is the one that runs on SQLite, which should be fine for a reasonable number of recipes and up to 20 users. If you’re planning to host a much bigger Mealie instance, with more users who all need to access Mealie simultaneously, then you can opt for a version which runs on PostgreSQL. This version should also offer better search, but will require more resources and may need a more powerful computer than a humble Raspberry Pi.
Adding recipes to Mealie
Once installed, and you’ve created an admin user, it’s time to add recipes. Mealie can import from a number of other recipe managers, although sadly not from Mela. So, I’ve been manually re-adding recipes as I go – I’ve made a start, but we have over 300 in Mela.
Recipes can be imported from a given URL, analysed from an image or typed in manually. You can also copy and paste the HTML of a web page if Mealie isn’t able to connect to a given URL; this is what I have done with some Mela recipes that I’ve exported as HTML.
Once the recipe has been imported, Mealie will then parse the ingredients. This allows it to build up a database of ingredients, so you can tell it what you have and it can suggest recipes from your library. It also allows you to adjust quantities in the recipe, if you want to make double or half, for example. By default, the parsing uses natural language processing (NLP) but if you have a paid OpenAI account, you can link this and have ChatGPT do the work too. I believe you can use other AI models if you wish, including self-hosted ones.
For the first few recipes, Mealie prompted me to decipher some ingredients that it didn’t understand. Although it has a ‘British English’ ingredient list, it’s not complete, and so I had to add some items. You can also added aliases for items, and over time, it got better at parsing recipes.
Phone apps
There are apps available for Mealie, but there isn’t an ‘official’ one as far as I can tell. On iOS, I’m using one called MealieSwift, which offers most features for free and the rest for a one-off £10 payment. Others are available. Once I’ve got more recipes migrated over, I’ll see about an Android app for Christine’s phone.
If you want to be able to access Mealie outside the home, then you may need to set up a reverse proxy – I use Nginx Proxy Manager for this. The Home Assistant Addon supports Ingress, so you can also access it remotely through the Home Assistant web interface if installed that way. Speaking of Home Assistant, there’s a built-in Mealie integration that you can setup once you have Mealie installed. Mealie offers a powerful API, and so you could potentially build some interesting automations with it.
Meal planning
As well as storing your recipes, you can use Mealie to plan meals, by allocating recipes to meals in a calendar. You can take that further and also use Mealie to develop a shopping list, which will include the ingredients for the recipes you have added to your meal plan. Mela does this as well, and integrates with the native calendar and reminders features on iOS and OS X. The MealieSwift app that I use doesn’t do this, but it should be possible using Mealie’s API.
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