High-protein meal planning, with the numbers up front

Protein is the number most people are watching on a recipe. Training for something, feeding a teenager, or just trying to stay full past 8pm, the question at planning time is the same: which dinners actually carry the protein? Most of the time you cannot tell without opening every recipe.

NoshUp puts the number where the decision happens.

The protein number is on the recipe card

NoshUp's recipe library holds more than 1,300 recipes across eight cuisines. Each recipe card shows the macros per serving: protein, carbs, fat, and fibre in grams. You do not have to open a recipe and scroll, and you do not have to guess whether a dinner "has protein". The grams are on the card while you browse; the calorie count is on the recipe's Details view.

Two things to know about the numbers:

1. They are estimates, from the same nutrition estimation chain that powers the calorie counts. How that works is covered in how NoshUp calculates recipe calories.
2. If a recipe has no nutrition estimate yet, the card shows none. We would rather show nothing than invent a number.

If you eat vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, or nut-free, set your household's dietary preference and generated plans draw from meals that respect it. Meals you add yourself are planned as you wrote them. You can also exclude specific ingredients, which keeps them out of suggestions while you browse; the details are in avoiding ingredients and setting dietary preferences.

A week of real numbers

Here is what a week of dinners can look like when you pick with the protein numbers visible, across the cuisines the library covers. These are dishes in NoshUp today, with their per-serving estimates:

Dinner	Calories	Protein
White bean and chicken bake with spinach, mushrooms and goat cheese	697	71 g
Buffalo chicken tostadas with cheddar, cool ranch and cucumber salsa	866	65 g
Cordon bleu chicken breasts with lemony dijon sauce and roasted asparagus	615	65 g
Black pepper flank steak with sesame cucumber and edamame salad	507	60 g
Tempeh and egg polenta bowl with cheddar and a spinach tomato side salad	658	44 g
Toasted pita pockets with tofu, spinach, mushrooms and melted mozzarella	560	36 g

To find any of these yourself: sign in, open Recipes, and type the dish name into Search recipes. The how-to for adding one to your week is in finding a recipe and adding it to your week.

Two things are worth noticing in that table:

1. Six dinners, six different meals, across Italian, Mexican, French, East Asian, North American, and Mediterranean cooking. The last two are vegetarian and clear 35 g anyway: the same numbers-first workflow works whatever your household eats.
2. The flank steak salad and the cordon bleu land within five grams of each other on protein but 100-plus calories apart. With both numbers visible, you can favour calories, protein, or both, dish by dish.

Vegetarian most weeks? The same browsing works, and Indian cooking in particular has its own guide in planning a week of Indian vegetarian meals.

Narrowing the field while you choose

To be plain about what exists today: there is no protein filter. The honest workflow is the one above, browse with the numbers visible and pick the ones that clear your bar. Two settings narrow the field while you do it:

• Calorie limit per serving. In your meal plan, open Tools, then Constraints, and set a calorie limit for the meals you care about, for example keeping dinners under 700. When a chosen meal does not fit, the plan marks it for review instead of silently breaking the rule.
• Cuisine focus. In Settings, Cultural module picks the cuisine your generated plans draw from, or Everyday Variety for a mix of all of them. Switching is a Pro feature and applies to your next generated plan.

From plan to grocery list

Once the week is set, the Sunday job is the grocery list. NoshUp builds it from the meals you choose: open Groceries, choose Add meals, pick the meals you are shopping for, and review the combined ingredients and amounts before they go on the list. Two dinners that both need carrots become one line with the total amount. The full walkthrough, including what happens when the plan changes mid-week, is in your grocery list, always up to date.

The last step is the one people forget until they are in the aisle: check what is on sale before you shop. Your grocery list marks items that have current flyer deals, and you can plan around them directly.

And if you want a hand picking the dinners in the first place, you can ask an AI assistant to do it, connected to your NoshUp account.

Ready to build your week? Browse the recipe library.