You meant to cook. Then work ran late, nothing in the fridge looked like a meal, and the takeaway app was already open. Cookly has free tools for planning a week's meals, building a shopping list and finding a recipe for what you have already got in, so there's an answer to what's for dinner before you reach for your phone. If you'd rather start from a dish than a tool, there's also a collection of weeknight recipes sorted by cook time.
Plan a batch cooking session for the week ahead Read the story behind CooklyNo fixed idea what to cook and half an hour to sort it. Cookly gives you tools for a plan, a list and a straight look at the cost.
Plan a batch cooking session and cook once for several nights instead of starting from scratch every evening. The shopping list builder is a separate tool: you type your meals and ingredients into it and it puts the list in order by aisle.
Try the batch cooking planner →Answer a short quiz on protein, diet and time to get two or three recipes matched to your evening, ready in around 30 minutes.
Try the meal finder quiz →Enter three to six ingredients you've got and see matching recipes, flagged for 30 minutes or batch cooking. Or try our pantry staples checker first.
Try the fridge matcher →Use our takeaway cost comparison tool to see how a home-cooked dinner stacks up against the takeaway you'd otherwise order, portion by portion.
Try the cost comparison →Enter your typical takeaway spend and see how many home-cooked weeks it takes to break even, as a rough guide only.
Try the break-even calculator →Enter your household size and weekly budget for an estimated cost per portion. If servings don't match your household, try our recipe portion scaler.
Try the budget planner →Prefer to look through recipes yourself? Browse weeknight recipes sorted by how long they take to cook.
Browse weeknight recipes →You get in tired, hungry, and there's half a bag of frozen peas and no plan. That's the exact moment Cookly is built for, not the calm Sunday afternoon when everything feels manageable.
You don't have to think up seven meals from nothing. Cookly gives you a week of dinners worked out in advance, with most meals on the table in 30 minutes and a few taking a bit longer because they're worth it. If it's just tonight you're trying to sort rather than the whole week, the 30-Minute Meal Finder Quiz asks a handful of quick questions about what you fancy, who's eating, and what's already in the fridge, then hands you two or three recipes that fit. Recipes are written for a default serving size, which rarely matches an actual household exactly, whether you're cooking for one or feeding four. The Recipe Portion Scaler takes a recipe's stated servings and your actual household size, then scales every quantity accordingly, including plain-language guidance for awkward fractions like 1.5 eggs. The plan accounts for what's realistic on a Tuesday evening, not what looks good in a cookbook.
One shop covers the whole week, because the list is built directly from the meals you're actually cooking. It's sorted by aisle, so you're not doubling back through the shop for one forgotten item, and there's no mid-week dash for something you didn't know you needed. Worth checking before you write the list at all: the Pantry Staples Checker asks which of around 20 core storecupboard items you've already got, things like tinned tomatoes, pasta, stock cubes and oil, then shows how many Cookly recipe categories you can already cover without shopping, plus the three to five items worth adding to make your pantry weekday-ready.
Recipes tell you upfront what you can swap and what you can't. Chicken thighs become canned chickpeas, double cream becomes crème fraîche, and the dish still works. Half a fridge of odd bits and pieces is often enough to cook from the plan, even when it doesn't match exactly. Try our What Can I Cook Tonight? (Fridge Ingredient Matcher) to see how this applies to your situation: enter three to six things you already have and it points you to recipes that use them, flagging which are under 30 minutes and which are worth batch cooking.
Each recipe shows a rough cost per portion, worked out from typical supermarket prices, so you're not guessing whether tonight's dinner is a £1.50 meal or a £4 one. Prices move about depending on where you shop and where you live, so treat the figure as a guide rather than a promise. If you want to see how a week of these dinners stacks up against ordering in, the Takeaway vs Home Cooking Cost Comparison tool walks through it with your own numbers. If you'd rather start from your budget than from a recipe, the Weekly Meal Budget Planner takes your household size, how many dinners you want to cook this week, and your total food budget, then works out a cost-per-meal target and flags whether that's realistic against Cookly's recipe range.
Some recipes are flagged for batch cooking, meaning one session in the kitchen makes enough for two nights. Cook it on Sunday and Tuesday's dinner is already sorted before Tuesday happens. Each batch recipe states how many extra portions you'll get, so there's no arithmetic involved. If you're not sure how many recipes fit into the time you've actually got, the Batch Cooking Session Planner asks how many free hours you have on Sunday, or whichever day suits, and how many weekday dinners you want covered, then suggests which recipes to make, in what order, and how many portions each one produces.
Some dishes freeze well and some fall apart in the process, so a recipe is marked freezer-friendly only when the whole dish, swaps included, holds up. Where a recipe keeps in the freezer, we say for how long, usually up to three months, so a portion from a few weeks back doesn't become a guessing game.
It's easy to feel like ordering in is cheaper once you're tired and the fridge looks empty, though the numbers often say otherwise. The Takeaway vs Home Cooking Cost Comparison tool sets a typical week of takeaways against a week of home-cooked dinners side by side, and it can give a wrong answer depending on what you enter and where you shop. The guide to using it explains how the comparison works and where the figures come from. If you're weighing up whether a subscription makes sense over a longer stretch, the Cook vs Order Break-Even Calculator takes your usual takeaway frequency and spend and works out how many home-cooked weeks it would take to cover the cost, shown as a simple timeline. Like the weekly comparison, it can only work from the numbers you give it.
Not every evening starts with a quiz or a fridge full of odd bits. Or browse our collection of weeknight recipes and cook times, sorted from the fifteen-minute dinners through to the ones worth the extra half hour at the weekend, so you can pick something straight off the list without answering a single question first.
Put your own numbers in and see what a week of home cooking would actually cost your household. Shop prices vary by retailer and region, so treat the answer as a starting point rather than a fixed figure. If you'd rather start from a recipe than a number, you can browse weeknight recipes sorted by cook time instead.