Sukkot Meal Planner Spreadsheet — Ushpizin & Sukkah Hosting Planner, Auto Grocery List, Cooking Timeline + Shabbat (Google Sheets + Excel)
Every planner on this page gives you a blank page to write on. This one does the arithmetic.
Rosh Hashanah is two days. Sukkot is nine, and every one of them has a meal on it. Two nights and two days of Yom Tov, then the whole of Chol HaMoed, then Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah — with a different number of people at the table almost every single night, and the food carried out to the sukkah for most of them.
The hard part was never remembering what to serve. The hard part is that the recipe serves eight and sixteen people are coming on the first night and ten on Monday, that the shopping list has to be written twice, that at half past four on Friday afternoon there are four things that all need the oven and they all want a different temperature — and that the kugel you were so proud of goes cold on the walk across the yard.
This is a working spreadsheet. You tell it who is coming and what you are making. It tells you what to buy, what it costs, what time to start each dish, and what time each dish has to leave the kitchen.
YOU CHANGE THE GUEST COUNT IN ONE CELL — AND ON SUKKOT YOU WILL CHANGE IT A LOT
★ Every recipe carries its own base servings — this one feeds 8, that one feeds 12.
★ You type the guest count for each meal, once. Sixteen on the first night, ten on Monday, eighteen on Simchat Torah.
★ The workbook works out the batches. Fourteen guests on a recipe that serves eight is 1.75 batches, and every single ingredient is multiplied by 1.75 — all the way through to the shopping list and the dollar figure.
★ In the example data in this file, round challah sits on eleven of the fifteen meals, at four different guest counts. The workbook orders 20.25 batches, 162 servings, 40.5 lb of bread flour — and puts it on the shopping list as one line.
THE SHOPPING LIST WRITES ITSELF — FOR THE WHOLE WEEK, NOT ONE DINNER
★ You never type a shopping list. It is built from your menu, ingredient by ingredient, across every recipe at every meal.
★ From the example data: kosher salt appears in 23 recipes. Yellow onions in 12. Lemons in 9 — 105.75 of them, $83.54. Eggs are in 9 recipes: 22.582 dozen needed, one dozen already in the fridge, buy 21.582 — $92.59.
★ There is an Already At Home column. Whatever you already have comes off what you buy, and never off what the recipes need.
★ Then the same list again, sorted into the order you walk your own store — you set the departments and the aisle numbers. Produce first, then Bakery, then Deli, then the back of the shop. Print it, or open it on your phone at the store.
THE CLOCK RUNS BACKWARDS FROM CANDLE LIGHTING
You give it the date and the time. It knows how long each dish takes and which dishes cannot wait. Straight from the example data in this file, with candle lighting at 6:30 PM and a 45-minute cushion:
★ Cholent — start at 7:00 AM.
★ Braised brisket — start at 12:45 PM. In the oven 1:45 PM to 5:15 PM at 325°F.
★ Honey roasted chicken — start at 3:25 PM. In the oven 4:15 PM to 5:30 PM at 400°F.
★ Potato kugel — start at 3:25 PM. In the oven 4:20 PM to 5:35 PM at 375°F.
★ Roasted root vegetables — start at 4:10 PM. In the oven 5:00 PM to 5:45 PM at 425°F.
★ Be out of the kitchen by 5:45 PM. Everything in one list, earliest start first, with your own buffer and your oven preheat already built into every line.
You are not converting minutes in your head any more. You are reading a time.
AND IT CATCHES THE OVEN CLASH
Look at those four lines again. 325°F, 375°F, 400°F and 425°F, all wanting the same oven in the same hour. That is not a hypothetical: it is what the example menu actually does, and the workbook says so, in words, on the row:
OVEN CLASH - 3 other dishes need the oven at a different temperature in this window
It finds 12 of them across the run. A printable planner has no way to tell you that. It is the mistake that ruins the timing every single year, and you now find it on a Tuesday instead of at 4:30 on Friday.
THE ONE THING NO OTHER PLANNER DOES: IT KNOWS THE FOOD HAS TO GO OUTSIDE
This is Sukkot. The food is cooked in a kitchen and eaten in a sukkah, and the distance between them is the whole problem.
★ Every meal has an In The Sukkah? column. Every recipe has a Holds Heat On The Way Out? column.
★ You tell the workbook how many minutes it takes to carry a course out. It works out what time each course has to leave the kitchen so it lands on the table when the meal is served — in the example file, 7:03 PM for a 7:15 PM meal.
★ And when a dish that is going out hot is one you marked as not surviving the trip, the row says so: TRAVELS BADLY - it goes out to the sukkah hot and you marked it as one that does not hold its heat on the way.
★ In the example data: 11 of the 15 meals are in the sukkah. 14 dishes go out hot. 7 of them are flagged. The roasted cauliflower is flagged at Shabbat lunch in the sukkah — and the same dish at the Simchat Torah dinner indoors is left alone by the sukkah check. Same recipe, same oven, different answer, because the walk is different.
★ There is a Does Not Travel Well count on every meal row, so a dish never hides just because a more urgent alert got to the row first.
MAKE-AHEAD ACROSS A FORTNIGHT, NOT AN AFTERNOON
★ A separate make-ahead list, in date order, with what freezes and what does not.
★ In the example file it runs 46 dishes across sixteen days — Thursday 9/17 through Friday 10/2 — including the cooking you do between the days, on Chol HaMoed, for the nights that come after.
★ Give any dish its own date, or leave it blank and it lands on the default day you set once.
IT COSTS THE WHOLE WEEK BEFORE YOU SHOP
★ Set a price per unit once and the workbook prices every recipe, every dish, every meal and every guest.
★ From the example data: $2,163.50 of food, $26.59 of it already in the kitchen, $2,136.91 to spend. Against a $1,800 budget that reads 118.7% — over by $336.91 in red, at the kitchen table, days before the register.
★ Cost per guest-seat: $10.58 across 202 seats. Most expensive meal: $285.61 for sixteen people on the first night, $17.85 a head.
★ And what each aisle will cost you: Produce $667.95 · Meat and Poultry $598.25 · Dry Goods and Baking $281.21 · Canned and Jarred $219.86 · Deli $116.89.
WHAT'S INSIDE (one file, 9 tabs)
★ START — the setup guide, the color legend, and the seven things worth knowing before you type.
★ SETTINGS — your event, your candle lighting time, your oven, the walk out to the sukkah, your budget, and the lists everything reads from: grocery departments in aisle order, units, the six ways a dish can get made, and the ushpizin labels.
★ MEALS — 18 rows, enough for the first night through Simchat Torah. Name, date, serving time, guest count, in-the-sukkah, and which ushpizin guest you are marking that night. Each row reports its dish count, kitchen minutes, cost, cost per guest, carry-out time and a plain-English status.
★ RECIPES — 50 ready rows, 28 filled in. Base servings, prep, cook, rest, reheat, oven and temperature, whether it holds its heat on the way out, and how you normally make it.
★ RECIPE INGREDIENTS — 400 ready rows, 219 filled in. What goes into each recipe for one batch. Type it once, forever.
★ MENU — 150 ready rows, one per dish per meal. Seventeen columns then calculate themselves, ending in a start time, an oven window, a carry-out time and an alert.
★ SHOPPING LIST — 120 ingredient rows, what the menu needs of each, what you have, what to buy, what it costs — then the whole thing again sorted by aisle with a Got It? column to tick.
★ COOKING TIMELINE — every dish you have to cook, earliest first, with oven windows, clashes and carry-out times. Below it, the make-ahead list in date order.
★ COMMAND CENTER — the whole run on one screen, an Out To The Sukkah panel, a chart of cost by meal, and the aisle-by-aisle table.
WORKS WITH
Google Sheets (free) and Microsoft Excel. Every formula was chosen so it behaves identically in both — nothing that breaks on the way across. Instant digital download, one .xlsx file, import instructions inside. No subscription, no login, no add-on to install. Yours forever.
IT DOES NOT DIE AFTER TISHREI
Fifty-two Shabbatot a year, Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, a Shabbat sheva brachot, a kiddush, a bar mitzvah lunch. Turn the In The Sukkah column to No and it is a Shabbat planner. The recipe library and the ingredient list you build once are the slow part, and you only build them once. After that, planning a meal is picking rows from a drop-down.
PLEASE NOTE
• Digital download — no physical item will be shipped.
• For use in your own home; please do not resell or share the file.
• This is a planning and organizing tool. It is not halachic guidance and it is not a substitute for it. It does not rule on what may be cooked, warmed, carried or prepared, on eruv tavshilin, on where or when you must eat, or on kashrut, and it does not calculate candle lighting times or any other zmanim — you type your own local time in. Whether you can cook at a given meal, and whether you are eating in the sukkah, are Yes/No answers that you set yourself; the workbook only holds you to them. For anything halachic, ask your rabbi.
• The ushpizin names in the file are labels you can edit, not a ruling. Customs differ on the order, on the spelling and on the practice itself. Replace them with your own family's list.
• Not medical, nutritional or food-safety advice. Follow the usual guidance on cooling, storing and reheating food.
• Every price, quantity, timing, temperature, name and recipe in the file is an editable placeholder we put there so the examples add up — not a recommendation and not a market price. Replace them with your own.
• The dollar figures and times quoted above come from the example data included in the file. They illustrate how the math works. They are not a forecast or a claim about what your own Sukkot will cost.
• Designed by us and built with the assistance of AI tools, then manually reviewed and verified — every formula was hand-checked against an independent calculation before release.
Questions before you buy? Message us — we answer fast, and we are happy to help you set it up.