Pick the view that matches how you think
The planner shows a week, a month, or a year. Most people live in the week view and visit the month when something is coming up. The year view is for people who batch cook in seasons, and if that is not you, ignore it.
Assign recipes to slots, and leave gaps on purpose
Each day has slots, and each slot carries its meal and time as a small label. Empty slots are drawn as outlines rather than as blanks, so the week reads as a plan with room in it rather than as a plan you failed to finish.
Pick from your recipes, your cookbooks, or what you cooked recently. Recently cooked is usually the fastest route.
Leave two slots empty deliberately. Leftovers happen, plans change, and a week with no slack is a week you abandon on Wednesday.
The most common planning mistake is filling every slot. A plan you follow four nights out of five beats a perfect plan you bin on Tuesday.
The meals you always cook, set once
If Friday is pizza, make it repeat. A recurring slot fills itself every week and still lets you override any single instance, so the routine costs nothing to maintain and nothing to break.
Send the week to a shopping list
This is the part that earns the ten minutes. The planned week becomes a shopping list, combined across recipes, so three recipes that each want an onion produce one line rather than three.
From there it is a normal list: you can add the things that are not from recipes, and take it to the shop in Shopping Mode.