1. Start with the meals you will actually prepare
Choose the dates until your next shop. Include breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks that need ingredients. Leave room for meals out and food already prepared. Eat for Health’s meal-planning guidance recommends thinking ahead about meals and snacks; a dinner-only list will not cover the rest of your week.
For each recipe, check its original yield and how many servings you intend to prepare. A recipe that makes four servings does not need a full batch of ingredients if you are cooking only two. Conversely, preparing four servings for two people still needs four servings’ worth of ingredients, even if some food is saved for later.
2. Scale each recipe, then add matching ingredients
Use this calculation for every ingredient: recipe amount × planned prepared servings ÷ original recipe servings. Combine amounts only when they refer to the same food in the same state.
For example, you are making two servings of a four-serving chickpea curry and three servings of a two-serving chickpea salad. The table shows selected shared ingredients, not complete recipes. All chickpea amounts mean cooked, drained chickpeas; capsicum weights mean the edible portion.
| Ingredient | Curry: half the recipe | Salad: 1½ recipes | Combined need |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drained chickpeas | 480 g × 2 ÷ 4 = 240 g | 240 g × 3 ÷ 2 = 360 g | 600 g |
| Capsicum | 200 g × 2 ÷ 4 = 100 g | 150 g × 3 ÷ 2 = 225 g | 325 g |
| Olive oil | 20 g × 2 ÷ 4 = 10 g | 10 g × 3 ÷ 2 = 15 g | 25 g |
If you already have 120 g drained chickpeas, you need another 480 g drained. If the tins you choose each state a drained weight of 240 g, buy two. A “400 g” net-weight tin is not automatically 400 g of drained chickpeas. Read the actual pack; drained yields vary.
If you have all 25 g oil, mark it as already on hand. If you have only 10 g, the shortfall is 15 g. The amount you buy may be a whole bottle, but the recipe still uses 25 g. Purchase amounts and recipe amounts should not be confused.
3. Check the amounts that cannot be converted automatically
MorselMetrics consolidates ingredients with the same food identity. Similar names may remain separate when the selected records differ. Check the recipe sources before treating two rows as interchangeable. When a declared stand-in food was used for the nutrition estimate, the shopping list retains the original recipe ingredient to buy.
4. Build and review the list in MorselMetrics
The meal planner with shopping list connects your saved plan to its ingredients. Automatic ingredient collection does not require automatic meal selection: you can choose your meals manually. Sign in to use your saved plan and private shopping lists.
- Check your plan. Review dates, recipe yields and prepared servings in the planner. Resolve uncertain ingredient identities and amounts in the recipe first.
- Open Shopping list. Set From and Through to your shopping period, then choose Review shopping list.
- Review Meals included. Untick meals you do not need to buy ingredients for, such as portions already cooked from a batch included elsewhere.
- Check every quantity. Open Edit / already have / recipe sources to see which meals use an ingredient. Review any Check quantities rows.
- Subtract what you have. Use Already have (grams) for a partial amount, or exclude the item if you have all of it. To write a purchase instruction such as “2 tins, 240 g drained each”, enter Amount to buy. This overrides the calculated display and disables the grams subtraction field, so include the pantry adjustment yourself.
- Add other groceries. Add coffee, fruit for unplanned snacks or household supplies separately. These additions belong to the shopping list; they do not add food to your nutrition plan.
- Save this list. Use Shopping mode to tick off purchases, or Print preview → Print / Save as PDF. PDF saving uses your browser’s print destination.
5. Refresh after a change, and count leftovers once
A saved list is not a promise that every later plan edit has already been applied. When the plan changes, use Update ingredients or Check planner and update ingredients. Changed quantities are flagged for review; extra groceries and purchase choices are retained.
Watch an old override: suppose you entered “2 tins” for the chickpeas, then removed the salad. The list may retain “2 tins” as your chosen purchase amount. Recheck it against the revised recipe need and what is in the pantry.
Watch a repeated batch: if Monday’s plan already includes all four prepared servings, adding two leftover servings on Tuesday can add more ingredients to shopping. Keep the food in Tuesday’s nutrition plan if needed, but exclude that leftover meal from the shopping list when Monday’s entry already covers its ingredients. If each day’s entry represents only the servings used that day, check that their combined quantity covers the batch exactly once.
Before leaving for the shops, ask: are the dates right, is each batch counted once, have I checked the pantry, and do the purchase instructions match the current plan? That short review is what turns an automatically generated list into something you can use.
Plan the meals behind your next shop.
Choose your recipes and prepared servings, then build and review the ingredients together.
Keep exploring
Reviewed 9 October 2026 against the MorselMetrics shopping and serving calculations. Recipe quantities are illustrative shopping examples, not a complete meal plan or food-composition data. General meal-planning guidance: Eat for Health, linked above.