🍽️ plan-to-eat-mcp

Stop typing recipes. Start telling them. Hand your favorite LLM the keys to your Plan to Eat recipe book, planner, and shopping list — over the Model Context Protocol.

A drop-in MCP server, a CLI, and a standalone Node client that give Claude, ChatGPT, any MCP-aware assistant, or your own shell full read/write access to your Plan to Eat account.

You:  "Save the Bon Appétit miso pasta from this URL and tag it weeknight."
LLM:  ✓ created recipe #48,872,094 — 7 ingredients, 25 min, tagged weeknight.

You:  "Plan dinner around it Tuesday and add the missing pantry items to my
       shopping list."
LLM:  ✓ event created 2026-05-05 / dinner / 4 servings.
      ✓ shopping list now reflects miso, mirin, and dashi.

…or, when you'd rather not talk to anything:

$ plan-to-eat get-planner-week 2026-05-04
start_date  2026-05-04
end_date    2026-05-10

ID        DATE        SECTION    KIND        RECIPE_ID  RECIPE_TITLE        DESCRIPTION            SERVINGS
────────  ──────────  ─────────  ──────────  ─────────  ──────────────────  ─────────────────────  ────────
67698872  2026-05-05  breakfast  recipe      17314561   Breakfast Sandwich                         8
67483177  2026-05-05  dinner     ingredient                                 Asparagus (in season)  0
67710784  2026-05-06  dinner     note                                       Cucumber salad         0

3 rows

That's it. No recipe re-typing. No copy-pasting URLs into a phone app. Just talk.

❤️ Why Plan to Eat?

If you're not already using it, Plan to Eat is genuinely the best meal-planning app I've ever used:

• A clip-anywhere recipe importer that actually works on real-world food blogs.
• Drag-and-drop weekly planner that automatically rolls ingredients into a shopping list, with smart units and pantry deduplication.
• Yours forever — your recipe book is portable, exportable, and not held hostage by an algorithm.
• Family-friendly — share recipes and menus with friends in-app.
• 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.

👉 Sign up with my referral link — you get the trial, and I get a tiny thank-you. Win/win.

✨ What this gives you

• 🤖 MCP server out of the box — point Claude Desktop, Claude Code, OpenClaw, or any MCP-compatible host at it and start talking to your recipe book.
• ⌨️ A CLI over the same tools — every MCP tool is also a plan-to-eat subcommand, with tables for humans and --json for scripts. One registry feeds both surfaces, so they can't drift.
• 🔐 Auto-auth & auto-recovery — set your credentials once, the server handles login, caches the cookie session to disk, and silently re-auths whenever Plan to Eat invalidates it.
• 🧰 36 tools, all the verbs that matter — full recipe CRUD, full meal-planner CRUD (add / move / duplicate / delete recipes, notes, and ingredient entries), reorder events in a slot, leftovers as a first-class workflow, freezer tracking, browse courses & cuisines & tags, count what's in your queue.
• 🗓️ Real planner control — view a week's plan with recipe titles pre-joined, schedule recipes on dates, attach prep notes, reschedule with one tool call, change servings, duplicate, search for duplicates, reorder same-slot events.
• 🛒 A shopping list you can actually work with — read it with the store and aisle each item is filed under, add items (Plan to Eat guesses the aisle and reuses the store you last picked), retitle or re-quantify a line, move items between stores, remove them, put them back.
• ❄️ Freezer tracking — after cooking, mark N portions as frozen with freeze_recipe_portions; check what's stashed with list_frozen_recipes; consume entries when you eat them (soft-delete, history preserved).
• 🍳 Real CRUD — including ingredient lists with proper units, directions, prep/cook times, nutrition, ratings, and tags.
• 📦 Tiny runtime — no Playwright, no headless browser, no native modules. Just fetch, the MCP SDK, and Zod. Boots in under a second.
• 🦺 100% TypeScript — fully typed Recipe, Ingredient, PlannerEvent shapes plus a generic _json<T> so your tools never have to guess what comes back.
• 📚 A library too — core/client.ts is a clean, plain-Node API client you can drop into any script.
• 🧠 Bundled Claude Code skill — .claude/skills/plan-to-eat/SKILL.md teaches any agent the common workflows and gotchas (the supper-vs-dinner alias, the description-vs-title mismatch, etc.) so it doesn't have to rediscover them.

Reverse-engineered from the live web app. There's no public Plan to Eat API, but the desktop site uses these same endpoints internally. Use at your own risk — they could change anything at any time.

🚀 Quick start

npx -y plan-to-eat-mcp          # run the MCP server
npm i -g plan-to-eat-mcp        # …or install both bins on PATH

Requires Node 18+ (for built-in fetch) and a Plan to Eat account.

The package ships two bins: plan-to-eat-mcp (the MCP server) and plan-to-eat (the CLI). To run the CLI through npx without installing, note that you have to select it explicitly, since the default bin is the server:

npx -y -p plan-to-eat-mcp plan-to-eat --help

git clone https://github.com/alex-zwingli/plan-to-eat-mcp.git
cd plan-to-eat-mcp
npm install
npm run build

Configuration

The CLI also reads a .env in the working directory (shell variables win). The MCP server does not — MCP hosts pass env explicitly, as shown below.

🤖 Use it with an agent

Any host that can launch a local stdio MCP server works. The server needs one command, two env vars, and nothing else — no ports, no OAuth, no daemon.

Claude Code, the easy way: install the plugin

The repo ships as a Claude Code plugin — MCP server and both skills in one step:

export PLAN_TO_EAT_USERNAME=you@example.com
export PLAN_TO_EAT_PASSWORD=hunter2

git clone https://github.com/alex-zwingli/plan-to-eat-mcp.git
cd plan-to-eat-mcp && npm install && npm run build

claude plugin marketplace add "$(pwd)"
claude plugin install plan-to-eat@plan-to-eat

That gives you:

Confirm with claude plugin details plan-to-eat@plan-to-eat and claude mcp list. The server reads PLAN_TO_EAT_USERNAME / PLAN_TO_EAT_PASSWORD from the environment Claude Code was launched with, so export them in your shell profile rather than committing them anywhere.

Claude Code, manually

claude mcp add plan-to-eat \
  --env PLAN_TO_EAT_USERNAME=you@example.com \
  --env PLAN_TO_EAT_PASSWORD=hunter2 \
  -- npx -y plan-to-eat-mcp

Add --scope user to make it available in every project instead of just this one. Check it connected with claude mcp list, or /mcp inside a session.

Claude Desktop

Edit claude_desktop_config.json — Settings → Developer → Edit Config, or:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "plan-to-eat": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "plan-to-eat-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "PLAN_TO_EAT_USERNAME": "you@example.com",
        "PLAN_TO_EAT_PASSWORD": "hunter2"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop, and you're cooking.

Any other MCP host

Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Cline, Continue, OpenClaw, VS Code's MCP support, and custom SDK clients all take the same three things. Point them at:

Most of them use the same mcpServers JSON block as Claude Desktop above — often in .cursor/mcp.json, .vscode/mcp.json, or the host's settings UI.

If you installed globally (npm i -g plan-to-eat-mcp), use the plan-to-eat-mcp bin as the command and drop the args entirely. If you built from a clone, the command is node with ["/absolute/path/to/plan-to-eat-mcp/dist/mcp/server.js"].

Absolute paths matter for the clone route. MCP hosts don't launch servers from your project directory, so a relative path will fail to resolve. The npx command above sidesteps this entirely.

Verify it works

PLAN_TO_EAT_USERNAME=you@example.com PLAN_TO_EAT_PASSWORD=hunter2 npx -y plan-to-eat-mcp

You should see [plan-to-eat] mcp server ready on stdio (36 tools) on stderr. That's the server waiting for a client — Ctrl-C out. If instead you get a credentials error, fix that before wiring up a host, where the failure is harder to see.

Teach your agent the workflows

Two skills ship in .claude/skills/, covering the common flows and the sharp edges (the supper-vs-dinner alias, the description-vs-title mismatch on note entries, checking for duplicates before scheduling):