Dinner picker

When you can’t decide what to make, ask Mirabel. She suggests recipes from your own kitchen — grouped by why they’re worth a look — or spins a weighted wheel for you.

1. On the Menu page, tap What Should We Make? at the top. Mirabel’s panel opens with one question — What should we make this week? — and four choices.
2. Tap a choice:
   • Forgotten favorites — recipes you’ve cooked before but not in a while.
   • What’s new — your most recently added recipes.
   • Quick wins — recipes where every ingredient is already on hand.
   • Spin the wheel — a weighted-random pick, for when nothing else jumps out.
3. Add what you like, or tap another choice to keep browsing. The question stays in the panel, so you can bounce between categories.

The What Should We Make? button appears once your kitchen has at least one recipe and Mirabel is set up.

Suggestions you can add

The first three choices show a short stack of recipe cards. Each card has:

• The recipe title — tap it to open the recipe and read it first.
• A one-line reason it’s here — how many times you’ve cooked it and when, when it was added, or how quick it is.
• An Add to Menu button — tap it and the recipe joins your menu right away. The button flips to On the menu ✓.

A category with nothing to show says so instead of leaving a blank space — cross a few dinners off over the coming weeks and forgotten favorites will fill in.

What each category means:

• Forgotten favorites are recipes you’ve marked Made it at least three times, but not in the last six weeks. Old reliables that have slipped off the rotation.
• What’s new is your newest recipes, most recent first.
• Quick wins are recipes where nothing is missing from your Pantry — everything’s on hand — sorted shortest first.

Spin the wheel

Spin the wheel drops a slot-machine-style cylinder of recipe titles right into the panel.

1. Tap the spin button — its label rotates through quips like I’m feeling lucky. The cylinder slows and lands on one recipe.
2. Take the suggestion or pass:
   • Take it. Tap Add to Menu. The recipe joins your menu.
   • Read first. Tap the recipe title to open it.
   • Pass. Tap the spin button again — its label rotates through respin quips like Spin again — and it rolls once more.

Type instead of tapping

You don’t have to use the buttons. Ask Mirabel what to make in her own words — “what should I make this week?” — and she’ll pull from the same suggestions, then talk them over with you. The choices are a shortcut, not the only way in.

If your menu is empty, the Menu page shows an …or ask Mirabel what to make this week button that opens the same thing.

How the weighting works

The wheel doesn’t pick uniformly at random. Two adjustments shape the odds:

• Recency. Each recipe carries a weight based on how often you’ve cooked it in the last 90 days. Recently cooked recipes weigh less; recipes you haven’t touched in months weigh full. Mirepoix records a cook when you mark a recipe Made it — crossing it off on the Menu page. Un-marking it undoes the cook; removing it from the menu with the × doesn’t count.
• Session passes. Each time you pass on a recipe, its weight drops for the rest of that spin session.

The same Made it history feeds the forgotten-favorites suggestion, which reaches back much further — over a year — so an old favorite can resurface long after the wheel has stopped penalizing it.

Mirabel keeps nothing on Mirepoix’s servers between visits — the panel’s conversation lives only in your browser.

See also

• Selecting recipes
• Mirabel, your kitchen helper
• Cooking mode
• QuickBites

Last updated July 8, 2026