Share the meal plan with the people you’re feeding.

You already know what’s for dinner on Thursday. The problem is that you are the only one who does — which is why the same question arrives every afternoon, from everyone, one at a time. A meal plan that lives only in the cook’s head is a meal plan the household can’t use.

So share the calendar. In Lucky Dog Recipes, the people you cook for are diners — the family, the roommates, the guests coming Saturday — and any of them can be given the week as it stands, on whatever they already own.

Plan the week once, in the place you already plan it

The calendar is the ordinary dated planner: drop recipes on days, under breakfast, lunch, dinner or snacks, with plain notes for the nights that aren’t a recipe. Two extra touches make it shareable — each meal carries who it’s for, and each meal carries how many it’s being made for, so a recipe written for four can be scaled to the seven people actually eating without editing the recipe.

Choose how much each person sees

Sharing is one decision, made once, in three settings:

• Off — nobody sees it. The default, and one switch away at any time.
• Everyone sees the whole calendar — the household view: one week, one plan, visible to all of it.
• Each person sees only their own meals — the week filtered to the meals that person is actually on. The kid who eats at home three nights sees three nights.

Either way it’s only ever the days ahead. Nobody you share with can see last week, and nobody can see your recipe library, your grocery lists or your other plans. If you want to drop one person, the roster lists everyone who has access with a stop next to each name.

They don’t need the app. They don’t even need an account.

Every person you share with gets the upcoming days as a clean, readable email — weekly, or every few days, your choice — and the first one arrives the moment you share. That’s enough for a parent who wants to know what you’re eating, or a houseguest who wants to know whether to eat before they arrive.

If they do have the app, they get more: the plan appears live in their own app under Shared with Me, updating as you change it, and on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android it can sit on their home screen as a widget labelled with your name. And if an email-only recipient installs the app later, their share upgrades to the live view on its own — nothing to re-send.

Who this is actually for

• The household — so “what’s for dinner?” is answered before it’s asked, and whoever is home first can start it.
• Split-schedule families — practices, shifts and late nights, each person seeing only the meals they’re actually home for.
• Roommates — who’s cooking, who’s on their own, and whose leftovers are whose.
• A parent or grandparent you cook for — the week arrives by email, no app, no account, no setup on their end.
• A kid at college — the family week on a phone, mostly for the homesickness.
• Guests coming for the weekend — send them the plan before they arrive, allergies already accounted for.
• A meal train — someone recovering, and a rotation of people who need to see what’s already been brought.

Allergies and portions come along for the ride

Each diner carries their allergens, their diets, and their dislikes, so the plan you’re sharing is already built around the people in it. Put them on a meal and the portions follow — which means the number on the recipe when someone opens it is the number for that night’s table, not the number the recipe’s author happened to write.

When you need everyone to edit, not just read

A shared calendar is read-only on purpose: it’s your plan, and the people you share it with are following it. When the cooking is genuinely shared — a camping trip, a rented cabin, a long weekend where four people each take a night — a shared menu is the other tool: same idea, but everyone invited can edit the plan, and every meal gets a cook’s name on it.

See how shared menus work for trips →

Common questions