Editing a recipe directly inside a meal plan
When you are working on a meal plan, you can click on the Recipes tab, and click the Edit button for each recipe.
If you are editing a recipe that you have created yourself, then you will be given the choice to:
- edit the recipe for all meal plans
- edit the recipe just for this specific meal plan.
For example, if you have a chicken-based recipe, and you want to replace the chicken for tofu, you will have to decide if this is a global change, i.e. you want the change to affect all the instances of the recipe across the software, including inside other meal plans.
Most of the time, you should choose the option to edit the recipe just for this meal plan. This means that other meal plans won't be affected.
Editing recipes in the separate recipe editor
You can also click on Recipes & Foods on the left-side menu and edit recipes there. When you do this, a question arises. What happens when I edit recipes that are already included in a meal plan?
Imagine the following scenario:
- You create a recipe, e.g. Chicken salad
- You add the recipe to a meal plan
- You go back to the Chicken salad recipe and edit it, i.e. by adding some ingredients or changing portions sizes
When editing a recipe that is included in one or more meal plans, the meal plans are not updated automatically to include the changes to your recipe. This is a design choice we have made because in our experience, in the majority of cases, it would be confusing for users that editing a recipe would change and alter many meal plans (some of the meal plans could have been already presented to clients months in the past).
When you edit recipes in NutriAdmin, you can be certain that meal plans won't automatically change, which is good to keep all your past meal plans as expected.
On the other hand, sometimes you will want to edit a recipe and to make your meal plan reflect the changes. If you want to do this, you need to make the changes in the meal plan explicitly. To do this you can:
- Edit your recipe as much as needed until you have the version you need.
- Go to the meal plan you want to edit
- Click on the recipe in the meal plan table and select Delete Recipe & Food.
- Repeat for all instances of the recipe in the meal plan
- Once all instances are removed, you can add back your recipe as normal. This time, the recipe will be added with the most up-to-date version.
It should be noted that you can edit any recipe. This includes recipes you create yourself or recipes from the recipes database. To edit a recipe from the database, you have to add it to a plan or save it separately. Editing a recipe this way will only affect your personal copy. The original recipe in the database will remain the same.