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.

AI-Powered Meal Planning

At the heart of Hearthlight is our intelligent meal planning system. Unlike basic meal planners that simply let you drag and drop recipes, Hearthlight’s AI understands your family’s needs and creates personalized meal plans automatically.

How It Works

When you set up Hearthlight, you tell us about your household—how many people you’re cooking for, any dietary restrictions or preferences, your budget, and how much time you typically have for cooking. Our AI uses this information to suggest meals that actually work for your life.

The system learns from your choices over time. Rate a recipe highly? You’ll see more like it. Skip certain ingredients consistently? We’ll stop suggesting them. The more you use Hearthlight, the better it understands your family’s tastes.

Key Meal Planning Features

Weekly Meal Plan Generation: Get a complete week of meals with one click. The AI balances nutrition, variety, and your preferences to create plans you’ll actually want to cook.

Dietary Profile Management: Set up profiles for each family member with their specific needs—vegan, gluten-free, nut allergies, low-sodium, or any combination. Hearthlight ensures every suggested meal works for everyone.

Budget-Aware Planning: Set your weekly grocery budget and watch Hearthlight prioritize cost-effective meals. We’ll show you the estimated cost per meal and per serving.

Time-Based Suggestions: Only have 20 minutes on weeknights but more time on Sundays? Tell Hearthlight your schedule and get appropriately timed recipes.

Leftover Integration: The AI considers what you’ll have left over from previous meals, reducing food waste and saving money.

Recipe Management

Hearthlight gives you access to thousands of recipes, but more importantly, it helps you organize and use them effectively.

Recipe Discovery

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

Filter by Everything: Narrow results by cuisine, cooking time, difficulty, dietary needs, and more.

Seasonal Suggestions: Get recipe recommendations based on what’s in season in your region.

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

Every recipe in Hearthlight comes with additional information you won’t find elsewhere:

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

Nutritional Information: Complete breakdown of calories, macros, vitamins, and minerals.

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

Suggested Timing: Best planetary hours and moon phases for preparing specific dishes.

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 extensive database contains the magical properties of hundreds of ingredients. Look up any 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

Set an intention for your meal—love, prosperity, protection, healing, creativity—and Hearthlight helps you choose ingredients and techniques that support your goal.

The app suggests:

• Which ingredients to include
• How to stir (clockwise for attraction, counterclockwise for banishing)
• Colors to incorporate through food presentation
• Words or affirmations to speak while cooking
• Music or sounds to play in your kitchen

Digital Grimoire

Build your personal book of magical cooking knowledge within Hearthlight:

Recipe Notes: Add your own magical notes to any recipe Kitchen Rituals: Save your personal cooking rituals and blessings Spell Recipes: Create and store recipes specifically designed for magical work Moon Phase Journal: Track which meals you made during different lunar phases and their effects Seasonal Celebrations: Store your Sabbat recipes and feast plans

Astrology Integration

Hearthlight is the only meal planning app that integrates 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
• Best times to cook different types of meals
• When to start specific recipes for maximum effect
• Planetary hour forecasts for the week ahead

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 chart (or your family members’ charts) and receive personalized recommendations:

• Foods that balance your elemental makeup
• Ingredients aligned with your Sun, Moon, and Rising signs
• Eating patterns that support your unique cosmic blueprint
• Which cuisines resonate with your chart

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
• Favorite cuisines and dishes
• Foods they dislike
• Allergies (highlighted with warnings)
• Nutritional goals

Chore Management

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

• Assign cooking responsibilities
• Rotate who cooks dinner
• Track kitchen cleaning tasks
• Set reminders for meal prep

Family Calendar Integration

Sync with Google Calendar to:

• Plan meals around family schedules
• Account for late nights, events, and travel
• Share the meal plan with family members
• Set cooking reminders

Dietary Tracking

Monitor your family’s nutrition over time:

• Weekly and monthly nutrition summaries
• Individual member tracking
• Balance alerts (too much sugar, not enough vegetables)
• Progress toward health goals

Shopping and Budget Tools

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

Smart Shopping Lists

Generate shopping lists from your meal plan automatically:

• Ingredients combined and organized by store section
• Quantities calculated precisely to reduce waste
• Items you likely already have are flagged
• Staple items automatically included

Store Integration

Connect with grocery stores for:

• Real-time price comparisons
• Digital coupon matching
• Online ordering integration
• Price tracking over time

Receipt Scanning

Scan your grocery receipts to:

• Track actual spending versus planned budget
• See price trends for items you buy regularly
• Identify where you’re overspending
• Build a personal price database

Budget Analytics

Understand your food spending:

• Weekly, monthly, and yearly summaries
• Cost per meal and per person breakdowns
• Comparison to previous periods
• Tips for reducing costs without sacrificing quality

Inventory Management

Never buy something you already have again.

Pantry Tracking

Log what’s in your:

• Refrigerator
• Freezer
• Pantry
• Spice cabinet

Expiration Alerts

Get notifications before food expires so you can:

• Use ingredients before they go bad
• Plan meals around what needs to be eaten
• Reduce food waste significantly

Inventory-Based Recipes

Search for recipes using only 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
• Recipes featuring your homegrown ingredients
• 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. Generate Your First Plan: Let the AI create a week of meals
4. Explore the Magic: Check out planetary hours and ingredient correspondences
5. Go Shopping: Generate your list and hit the store
6. Cook with Intention: Follow recipes with magical guidance
7. Track and Improve: Rate meals and watch the AI get smarter

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