One vegetarian, one fussy seven-year-old, one person who'd eat curry every night. A lot of meal planning advice quietly assumes a household eats the same thing, which is exactly the households that give up on it fastest.

The quick answer

Meal planning for fussy eaters and mixed-diet households works best with strong filters and flexible portions, not five separate meal plans. In Petal Home, free to use:

• Pick a category first (breakfast, dinner, sweet treats and more), then filter by diet, main ingredient, what it's good for, and time
• Servings scale automatically on any library recipe, from 1 to 50, opening at your household's usual size
• Star your saved recipes to find them again, personal to you, free
• More than one meal a day is possible with Premium, breakfast, lunch, dinner and anything else
• A meal's ingredients add to the shopping list in a couple of taps

Filters that do the actual work of finding something

• Diet: vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, low-carb, high-protein, healthy
• Main ingredient: chicken, beef, pork, lamb, fish, seafood, eggs, beans & pulses, tofu & veg, pasta, rice & grains
• Good for: kid-friendly, budget, freezer-friendly, one-pot, 5 ingredients, lunchbox, no-cook, batch-cook, fakeaway, leftovers
• Time: under 15, 30 or 60 minutes, or over an hour

A simple way to plan for mixed diets

Filters help you find something, but the fastest way to actually cut down the deciding is a rough method behind the scenes:

• Pick the shared base first: pasta, rice, wraps, potatoes, curry, a traybake
• Add one variation only where someone genuinely needs it
• Keep one or two reliable favourites in rotation each week
• Save the more adventurous meal for a night when there's time
• Plan portions for who's actually eating, not a fixed number

Cooking for the number you actually have

One plan the household chooses together

A day's plan lives at the household level, one shared plan everyone's cooking from, rather than a separate profile per person to maintain. With Premium, that stretches further when it needs to: more than one meal on the same day, breakfast, lunch, dinner and anything else, so a vegetarian option can sit alongside the main meal, covering a common mixed-diet situation without needing five parallel meal plans to do it.

Keep what worked

Star your favourite saved recipes and they're easy to find again, your stars are just yours. My recipes holds your own saved recipes, free up to 5, unlimited with Premium, and importing one from a link, when you've found it worth keeping elsewhere, is a Premium feature too.

The actual goal isn't variety, it's less deciding

A mixed-taste household doesn't need infinite variety, it needs the deciding to take less out of whoever's doing it. Filters that match real constraints, a servings count that's already right, and a couple of taps from plan to shopping list, that's what turns "what's for dinner" from a nightly negotiation into something closer to a formality.

Petal Home brings meals, recipes and the shopping list they build into one calm shared space. More on the everyday version of this in our piece on the shared family shopping list that actually works.