The Complete Guide to Hearthlight: Every Feature Explained

Hearthlight isn’t just another meal planning app. It’s a comprehensive kitchen companion that combines practical meal planning with intentional cooking, astrology integration, and family management tools. Whether you’re a busy parent trying to get dinner on the table, a kitchen witch looking to infuse your cooking with magic, or someone who wants to align their meals with cosmic energies, Hearthlight has something for you.

This complete guide walks you through every feature Hearthlight offers, showing you how to transform your kitchen from a place of stress into a sanctuary of nourishment and intention.

Meal Planning

At the heart of Hearthlight is the meal planner: a weekly calendar where you place recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Fill it by hand, or let the planner’s Oracle recommend meals from the recipes you have saved.

How It Works

When you set up Hearthlight, you choose your household’s dietary preferences. In the planner, you drag a recipe onto a day, or add a meal from a list.

The Oracle works from your household’s saved recipes. Tell it what matters this week, and it recommends meals that fit, each with its reason. You choose which ones go on the calendar.

Key Meal Planning Features

The Oracle: Choose proteins, dietary restrictions, a moon phase, and how many days to plan, up to two weeks. The Oracle recommends meals from your saved recipes.

Dietary Profile Management: Set up profiles for each family member with their specific needs: a diet, allergies, and foods they dislike.

Cost of Your Plan: See the estimated cost of the meals you have planned, worked out from each recipe’s estimated cost per serving.

AI Kitchen Assistant: Ask the assistant to find recipes you can make from your inventory, draft a meal plan from your saved recipes, or add items to your shopping list.

Recipe Management

Hearthlight starts your household with a set of recipes, and helps you gather, organize, and use your own.

Recipe Discovery

Search by Ingredient: Have chicken thighs and broccoli? Search for recipes using what’s in your fridge.

Filter Your Recipes: Narrow results by cuisine, difficulty, meal type, protein, dietary needs, and moon phase.

In Season: See which fruits and vegetables are in season this month.

Intention-Based Search: This is where Hearthlight gets magical. Search for recipes by intention (abundance, comfort, energy, healing) and find meals that align with your goals.

Recipe Saving and Import

URL Import: Found a recipe online? Paste the URL and Hearthlight extracts all the details automatically.

Manual Entry: Add your family recipes with our easy entry form.

Photo Scanning: Take a photo of a recipe from a cookbook and let our AI extract the text.

Recipe Scaling: Automatically adjust ingredient quantities for any number of servings.

Recipe Enhancement

A recipe in Hearthlight can carry more than its ingredients and steps:

Magical Correspondences: Learn the spiritual properties of ingredients and how they contribute to the meal’s energy.

Cost Estimates: Know what you’ll spend before you start cooking.

Moon Phase: See the moon phase that a dish suits.

Kitchen Witchcraft Tools

For those who practice kitchen witchcraft or simply want to cook with more intention, Hearthlight offers a comprehensive suite of magical tools.

Ingredient Correspondences Database

Our correspondences database holds the magical properties of ingredients. Look up a food to discover:

• Elemental associations: Fire, Water, Earth, Air
• Planetary rulers: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn
• Magical intentions: What energies each ingredient brings
• Seasonal connections: When ingredients are most powerful
• Substitution suggestions: Alternatives with similar magical properties

Intention-Based Cooking

Choose an intention for your meal (love, prosperity, protection, healing, creativity) and Hearthlight helps you find what supports your goal.

Across the app you can find:

• Which ingredients carry that intention
• Recipes of yours that share it
• The planetary hours that favor it

Digital Grimoire

Build your personal book of magical cooking knowledge within Hearthlight:

Grimoire Entries: Add a recipe to your grimoire with its intentions and how well it worked Lessons: Read the grimoire’s library of kitchen witchery lessons, and bookmark the ones you return to Energy Journal: Record how a meal felt, with its moon phase, your energy, and your notes

Astrology Integration

Hearthlight brings astrology into your cooking practice.

Planetary Hours

Ancient astrologers divided each day into planetary hours, each governed by a different celestial body. Hearthlight shows you:

• Current planetary hour and its ruling planet
• The full schedule of hours for the day you choose
• The best time for an intention, with the Best Time Finder

Sun Hours: Best for vitality, confidence, success dishes Moon Hours: Ideal for comfort food, family meals, emotional nourishment Mercury Hours: Perfect for brain-boosting foods, communication-focused dinner parties Venus Hours: The time for love-drawing recipes, beautiful presentations Mars Hours: Cook energizing, bold, spicy dishes Jupiter Hours: Abundance recipes, feast preparation, prosperity cooking Saturn Hours: Grounding meals, ancestral recipes, discipline-focused eating

Birth Chart Cooking

Enter your birth details and Hearthlight draws your chart. From it you receive:

• Recipes matched to your chart’s elements and planets
• Written interpretations of your placements

Lunar Phase Cooking

Track the moon’s journey and align your cooking:

New Moon: Great for starting new eating habits, cleansing recipes Waxing Moon: Building, growing; abundance and prosperity foods Full Moon: Celebration meals, manifesting feasts Waning Moon: Releasing recipes, lighter fare, clearing out the fridge

Family Management

Hearthlight understands that cooking for a family involves much more than recipes.

Household Profiles

Create profiles for every household member:

• Dietary restrictions and preferences
• Favorites
• Foods they dislike
• Allergies
• Nutritional goals

Chore Management

Keep your kitchen running smoothly with built-in task management:

• Assign chores to members of your household
• Rotate a chore between members
• Mark chores done as the week goes

Calendar Export

Download your meal plan as a calendar file from the meal planner, and import it into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or another calendar app to see each planned meal there.

Shopping and Budget Tools

Hearthlight turns meal planning into actual meals with its shopping features.

Smart Shopping Lists

Generate shopping lists from your meal plan:

• Ingredients from the week’s recipes combined, with their amounts added up
• What your inventory already covers is taken off
• A preview of the list before it is made

Price Comparison

Search for a grocery item to see what it costs:

• Store prices, where Hearthlight has a store’s price data
• An AI estimate, marked as an estimate, where it has none

Receipt Scanning

Scan your grocery receipts to:

• Read the items, the store, the date, and the total from a photo
• Add what you bought to your pantry
• Keep a record of your receipts

Plan Costs

Understand what your meals cost:

• An estimated cost per serving for each recipe
• The estimated cost of the meals in your plan

Inventory Management

Never buy something you already have again.

Pantry Tracking

Log what’s in your:

• Refrigerator
• Freezer
• Pantry
• Spice cabinet

Expiring Soon

Your Today page lists what expires in the next week, so you can:

• Use ingredients before they go bad
• Plan meals around what needs to be eaten
• Waste less food

Inventory-Based Recipes

Find recipes that use what you have on hand, perfect for “what’s for dinner?” moments.

Special Features

Secret Santa Organizer

During the holidays, use Hearthlight’s Secret Santa feature to:

• Create gift exchange events
• Automatically assign pairings
• Share wishlists securely
• Send reminders to participants

Sabbat and Celebration Planning

For those who celebrate the Wheel of the Year:

• Complete guides for each Sabbat
• Traditional recipes for every celebration
• Ritual suggestions incorporating food
• Seasonal ingredient spotlights

Garden Integration

If you grow your own food:

• Track what’s in your garden
• Get planting suggestions based on your zone
• Companion planting guides

Getting Started with Hearthlight

Ready to transform your kitchen? Here’s how to begin:

1. Create Your Account: Sign up free and tell us about your household
2. Set Up Profiles: Add family members and their dietary needs
3. Plan Your First Week: Ask the Oracle for meal recommendations, or build a weekly meal plan by hand
4. Explore the Magic: Check out planetary hours and ingredient correspondences
5. Go Shopping: Generate your list using our grocery budget tips
6. Cook with Intention: Follow recipes with magical guidance
7. Keep What Works: Save the recipes your family loves

Some features need a paid plan. The pricing page shows what each plan includes.

Why Hearthlight Is Different

Other apps give you recipes. Hearthlight transforms your entire relationship with food and cooking.

We understand that feeding your family is about more than nutrition. It’s about love, tradition, intention, and magic. Every meal is an opportunity to nourish bodies and spirits, to connect with cosmic rhythms, and to create moments of genuine presence in our busy lives.

Whether you’re a practical planner who just needs to get dinner done or a kitchen witch who sees every meal as a sacred act, Hearthlight meets you where you are and helps you cook with more ease, more joy, and more meaning.

Start free today and discover what intentional cooking can do for your family.