How to use Kvali

The Recipes tab is the whole collection. The field at the top searches by name, and the four buttons to its right narrow the list in different ways. Each one clears the others, so you are only ever in one mode at a time.

The funnel opens the topic filter: chips grouped by facet, covering cuisine, course, main ingredient, sauces and sides, method, dietary and theme. Tap as many as you like and press Apply. Topics combine with AND, so Italian plus Fish gives you Italian fish dishes, not everything Italian and everything with fish. The badge on the funnel counts how many are active, and Clear all empties the sheet.

Only topics that have recipes behind them are offered, so the list grows on its own as new recipes are tagged.

The other three buttons are shortcuts. The person shows the recipes your household wrote, the lightning bolt shows the app-only weeknight recipes (next section), and the heart shows your favourites.

Everything published on this website is in the app, and on top of that come more than 400 recipes written for the app alone. They are not on kvalifood.com at all.

They are small on purpose. Each is one component of a dinner rather than the whole evening: this is the protein, this is the potatoes, this is the green thing on the side. That is what makes the planner’s protein / carbs / veg slots work, and it is the pool Generate meal plan draws from when it fills a week.

Reach them with the lightning bolt in the Recipes tab. If you want a weeknight dinner assembled out of parts rather than one long recipe, start here.

Tap any recipe to open it. The - 1x + control beside Ingredients multiplies the amounts, from a quarter upwards, so you can cook the same recipe for two or for eight without doing the arithmetic. It is hidden when you open a recipe from a planned meal, because there the plan’s serving count is already driving the scaling.

Some recipes have a gluten-free version, and the toggle switches the ingredient list between the two. Setting it here only changes what you are looking at. To make it stick for a meal you are cooking, set it on the planned dish in the Week tab instead, and the shopping list follows too.

Where the ingredient data allows it, nutrition per 100 g is listed under the directions. Recipes where too many ingredients are unknown say so instead of guessing.

Favourites are the bridge between browsing and planning. If you find a recipe on this website that you want to cook, the route into your week runs through the heart.

Save a recipe. Open it in the Recipes tab and tap the heart in the top right. It is now in your favourites, which you can list at any time with the heart button in the Recipes tab header.

Put it in the week. Go to the Week tab, pick the day, and use + Add favourite under the meal instead of + Add recipe. That gives you a picker of everything you have saved, which is a much shorter list than the whole collection. Choose the recipe and it lands in the meal at your household’s default serving count.

Save a whole meal, not just one dish. When a day’s combination works - the roast, the potatoes and the salad together - tap the heart on the meal heading rather than on a single dish. That saves the whole group as one favourite. Later, + Add favourite on another day drops all of its recipes back in at once, as a unit.

Both kinds live together under the heart filter in the Recipes tab: saved recipes appear as ordinary recipe cards, and saved meals as a card you can expand to see the dishes inside. Tapping the heart on a saved meal removes the whole group.

Favourites only in the Week tab draws on the same list. Switch it on and Generate meal plan builds the week from what you have saved instead of the whole collection.

The Week tab shows one week, one day at a time. The strip across the top moves between days, the arrows either side of the date move between weeks, and a dot under a day means something is planned for it.

A day is made of meals. A meal is a heading with dishes under it, and each dish has a role: protein, carbs, veg. + Add recipe searches the collection, + Add favourite picks from what you saved, and + Add breakfast or lunch puts another meal on the day.

Per dish you can change the servings with the minus and plus buttons, move it up or down inside the meal, shuffle it for a different recipe in the same role, or remove it.

The padlock on a meal heading freezes it. A locked meal and its dishes survive a reshuffle and cannot be edited or reordered until you unlock them. The heart beside it saves the whole meal as a favourite, as above.

For an empty week, Generate meal plan fills it in one go. Switch on Favourites only first if it should draw from what you have saved instead of the whole collection.

The Shopping tab always shows the list for whichever week the planner is on, and it builds itself. There is nothing to press to make it appear.

Lines are combined by ingredient and grouped by aisle, in the order you walk a supermarket. The coloured badge is the trip: This trip for what you need now, Mid-week for what would not survive being bought this early, and no badge at all for anything that can wait. Tap a line to see which recipes it came from.

Tap the box to tick something off. It moves to the bottom under DONE, and it disappears for anyone else in the household who happens to be shopping at the same time. Add item manually at the bottom covers everything the plan does not know about, and you can put it in an aisle so it turns up in the right place in the list.

The Cook tab opens on today. If more than one meal is planned for the day, the chips under the date choose which one you are cooking.

Each dish gives you its ingredients at the planned number of servings, then the directions split into steps. Tap a step to strike it out; the counter beside the title tracks how far along you are, and Reset clears it. The sun icon in the header keeps the screen awake while you cook.

The tab keeps up with the date on its own, so it is on tonight’s food when you open it in the evening. Once you deliberately move to another day it stays there until you tap the calendar button to come back to today.