Plan To Eat: A meal planning review & giveaway
By mom4life | Category: It Worked 4 Me, Recipes & Kitchen Tips
Eating is necessary, planning for it is optional.
However, over the years I have discovered (or been reminded-again and again) how helpful it is when I take the time to plan out our meals for the week. As silly as it may sound, I can recall the first time this idea of planning meals ahead of time occurred to me. I was newly married with no kids and standing in the middle of a friend’s beautifully retro themed kitchen. Neatly attached to her antique fridge door was a little handwritten note indicating what she planned to make for dinner each day of the week. I stood looking at that list in wonder and amazement as the realization that I could have control over our dinner plans began to take root in my mind.
Since that day, I have worked to implement dinner planning into my routine with varying levels of success. The frustration point for me is that there are so many steps involved in the process:
-Choose the meals/Find the recipes
-Decide which day each meal will be made
-Check the ingredients needed
-Confirm which items are on hand
-Create a grocery list for needed items
-Remember to take list to the store
-Attempt to maintain my sanity and not forget anything on my list as I shop with young kids
-Buy the items
-Cook the meals
-Repeat the process, again and again and . . . well you get the idea
Because the end result of planning ahead is always more rewarding (and less expensive) than the alternative of frantically coming up with something at the last minute (before diverting to getting a Papa Murphy’s pizza), I have persevered though the trenches of meal planning refusing to give up. Last year some of my friends may recall my all out attempt to beat the system by pre-planning a several weeks worth of meals, creating a word document for the needed ingredients and noting next to each ingredient which recipe it corresponded to. My plan was to get several weeks of meal plans ready to go so that I could simply pick a week, print off the grocery list, cross off what I already had on hand and head to the store to buy the rest. Although this plan was pretty good in concept, it took a long time to set up and unfortunately, lacked the ability to be easily customized. For example, I don’t often make zucchini quiche in the winter (I prefer it made from garden fresh veggies). If I added my quiche recipe to a week then that week wouldn’t be ideal year round. I decided that I needed more flexibility in my meal planning. I eventually abandoned my project and returned to my previous planning methods (which was mostly wait until the last minute and secretly hope someone had come to my house and magically put dinner in the fridge without me noticing).
My world began to change when I was introduced to ZipList and found a way to upload recipes into an online data system which could then push the ingredients from selected recipes into a shopping list accessible from my phone or computer. Despite the appeal of this free service, after several weeks of use, I found that there were some key features missing from this website which prevented it from being ideal. Missing features included:
-The ability to tag, organize or label recipes for easy categorization, organization and locating.
-The missing “calendar” component, helping me to plan and remember which night I would make each dish.
-Duplicating (rather than consolidating with a new total amount needed) like-ingredients on my shopping list when more than one recipe calls for the same ingredient.
I was willing to put up with the missing features until I was introduced to the Mother of all meal planning websites (cue Heavenly music. . .):
Plan to Eat takes all the needed components of meal planning and combines them into one consolidated, user friendly, eye pleasing system that takes all the yucky parts of meal planning out of the equation.
I won’t sugar coat it: In my opinion, the most tedious part of moving to an online meal planning service is the front end work of uploading your recipe favorites. Thankfully, even this part of the process can be pretty straightforward especially if you have begun to save recipes from the internet. Plan To Eat allows you to add new recipes in just seconds using their import feature. Search for recipes across more than 100 popular sites using keywords such as recipe names, ingredients, courses, cuisines, etc. or simply enter the direct URL of a specific recipe. Import them to your Recipe Book with just one click. Have some old favorites in cook books? Add recipes from your own collection using the bulk input option, which formats each recipe for you.
Once your recipes are uploaded, you can search for them in a number of ways such: your custom tags (Vegetarian, Bean Recipes, Family Favorites), the type of cuisine (French, Italian, Mexican), or by course (Breakfast, Dinner, Dessert), Prep time and more.
After you have located the recipe you want to add to your upcoming meal plan, you simply add it to your “cue”. Now that you have the number of meals you want to plan for saved in your cue, you can add them to your meal planning calendar (or if you haven’t yet added any to your cue, you can simply scroll through your recipes located to the left of your calendar). Dragging and dropping the meals from your cue to your calendar is easy, as is rearranging them to a new day should your schedule change.
Hovering over a meal in your calendar will allow you to see a handy summery of that meal’s summery description, prep time, nutritional information and the URL link from which it was imported.
Ready to create your shopping list? It couldn’t be easier. All your ingredients have been consolidated and categorized according to where it should be located in the grocery store (baking, canned goods, produce). Taking it a step further, you can then organize ingredients by store allowing you to plan what needs to be purchased where. If you already have some of the ingredients on hand, simply mark “don’t need” and they will be moved to your “pantry inventory”. The “recipe key” allows you to easily identify which ingredients correspond to which recipes.
With the click of a button, your grocery list can be shared via email or printed. Or if you prefer, you can access the list via your smart phone and mark the ingredients off your list as you shop (which will move them into your pantry inventory along with the date of purchase).
Unfortunately, dinner clean up is still going to need your manual attention, but perhaps you will find that you have more reserved energy for dishes once you have simplified the preparation process!
What do you think? Can you see yourself using a service like Plan To Eat? Would you like to give it a try? Why not sign up for their free 30 day trial (that is how I got started) and take it for a test drive. Paid plans start at $4.95/month or $39/year. Want to learn more? Click on over and take a tour of their site!
Plan To Eat has generously offered to give away 2 yearly subscription to their service (a $39 value). To enter, simply visit the Plan To Eat website and then come back and tell us which feature is most exciting to you. You have until this week Thursday at noon PST to enter. The winner will be announced this Friday on the blog, good luck!
(May 26: Congratulations to Mechele and Susanna for each winning a year subscription!!)
Full disclosure: After using the free trial service from Plan to Eat, I was pleased enough with the service to want to pass it on to you in the hopes that you would also find it useful. I have signed up for their affiliate program, so if you click though the links above and later sign up for a paid subscription I will get a small percentage, thanks:)!
I HAVE to beleive the pantry inventory will be a lifesaver….over time, I should know stuff I have on hand and can build menues from that as well! I do a “relatively” good job of planning for a week, but to be able to send the list to my husband to do the shopping will be very helpful. I hope I win!
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Wow! This might be what I have been looking for. I was just about to try to do a four week menu plan but by hand… this should be much faster in the long run since I have most of my recipes online. (And we have #4 arriving on the 31st!) I like that I can drag and drop recipes by days so that it’s much more flexible and that I can import recipes from online and that I can use it on my iPhone. Do you know if the shopping lists can be synced to two phones? If yes, this could be perfection!
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mom4life Reply:
May 23rd, 2011 at 10:41 am
@Jess, Congrats on your baby coming on the 31st! I am going in to be induced on the 31st as well:)! We could even share recipes with each other;). Right now this website doesn’t have an “app” per se for your smart phone but you can create a “bookmark” that links directly to your “recipes” or “shopping list” page from your iphone. My husband uses an ipad and he can access it the same way so yes, you should be able to sync from two phones. Hope that helps answer your question.
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Jess Reply:
May 26th, 2011 at 9:35 am
@mom4life,
Thank you that is helpful. I think I will do the trial for the menu planning aspect at least. Maybe they will have an app in the works soon. We’ve been using Cozi to sync lists between phones and computers which makes it super easy to send DH to the store after work etc. as these days I have no desire to bring all the kids to the store.
Good luck with you new baby as well. Maybe they will end up sharing a b-day. I’ll be thinking of and praying for you. (And once I upload and figure out how to share recipes, I think that’s a great idea!) Congrats and good luck!
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mom4life Reply:
May 26th, 2011 at 10:05 am
@Jess, Cozi is great, isn’t it? My husband and I use that too (mostly for our calender though). It is so helpful to find online tools to help simplify everyday stuff. I hear you on not wanting to bring all the kids to the store:)! Our countdown is SO close, I bet you are excited, I know I am!
Love the pantry list. Hopefully this will save me from buying unnecessary items, or forgetting something. Great idea!
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Wow, I just recently started looking for something like this! I love how you always seem to know just what moms need! =) My favorite thing about this is how easy it seems-drag meals to calendar, create grocery list, then just print or send to my phone……and the items will move to my pantry list so I’ll never have to wonder if that was corriander or cumin I just saw on my spice rack!?!? That’s genius. Thank you for sharing & thanks to Plan to Eat for giving away two subscriptions for free!
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My favorite feature is the list making and printing. My biggest problem when doingg the grocery planning is that my list is always scribbled on, sloppy, hard to read, etc. I coupon and it would be really nice to have it all printed out for exactly what I need.
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Meal planning is something I always struggle with, and especially now that we’re expecting #2 in July I know it is something I need to get better at. I use lots of online recipies, so I’m really excited about the import feature for those. I additionally love the idea that you can just send the list to your phone for use at the grocery store!
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It’s so good to see that there are other families out there planning as strictly as I attempt to! We are only a tight budget, so I am definitely thinking that the pantry inventory would be AMAZING!!! I won’t be wasting money on buying things more than once! Fingers crossed…
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The most excited part for me is that it will put together my shopping list! That is one if the most tedious parts of meal planning for me..
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I will for sure try the free trial and see what I think. I am most excited about the meal planning feature – No more white board!
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I am loving the import feature. I hate having to try to keep all my recipes and cookbooks straight. Now if only I could find the motivation to actually cook…
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“Adding Recipes in Seconds” via the import feature would be sooo awesome – instead of thumbing through various recipes and writing down everything on paper, I could just drag and drop into the menu…..
Thanks for passing on this website and service, Heather! If I don’t win one of the free yearly subscriptions, I’ll definitely try the free trial!
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So many features!!! Love this! So user friendly! I like the way you can drag recipes into the meal plan and that it automatically creates your shopping list! I especially like that the program keeps track of items purchased and WHEN an item was purchased! I will definitely try the free trial! Thanks for passing this along!
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I’ve been using it for a month and I really, REALLY love it. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t sign up through your affiliate link though. Sorry
I think that it leaps beyond Ziplist in it’s ability to print recipes (complete with the picture!) and the calendar function with the queu is amazing. I have been using that quite a bit, and I like that you don’t always have to have a complete recipe in order to plan the menu. It allows you to enter notes and stand-alone ingredients for certain days. So on a baseball game day, I could just put in there “hamburger buns” and they would get added to my list, since I know I have everything else to make the meal. They pretty much thought of everything. Sometimes it almost felt like it had TOO many features and it took me a little while to really figure out how to use it. But now that I am, I’m really happy with it.
GREAT post, Heather!
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mom4life Reply:
May 24th, 2011 at 8:46 am
@Kira @ Kissing the Joy, great feedback! I am glad to know that it works like you mentioned in just adding stand alone ingredients, I haven’t tried that yet. I am really happy you are enjoying it.
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I love the shopping list organizer. I can’t seem to remember to take my list to the store, but I always have my phone with me. So I’d never be without it! Very neat. Thanks for the chance to win.
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I have always thought it would be silly to pay for a service like this… but wow, this one is so worth it. My favorite part is the automatic organizing of the grocery list – I always have to go back to a previous aisle when I’m shopping!
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As a working Mommy of 3, and a husband who works nights, this service is an answer to prayer! I have tried meal planning before and while it Definitely works, it was hard to continue. I love the user-friendliness (is that a word?) of the website! The shopping list is a major plus as well!!
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Wow! Planning my meals has been another tedious mom task I have failed at over and over again! I really look forward to giving this a try….fingers crossed!!
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The hardest part of meal planning for me are the logisfics. All the features, especially the combined shopping list (on your mobile) would be awesome. It would be great to have this as a long term resourse.
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I love the pantry and shopping lists!
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Having access to my grocery list on my phone is key. I’m Always forgetting it or have five lists on paper scraps going at once.
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I like the calorie counting feature and how all my recipes would be centralized ready for monthly menu planning.
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[...] to Mechele and Susanna for each winning a year’s subscription to Plan to Eat from our Plan to Eat Review and Giveaway! If you enjoyed learning about this website and what it has to offer, be sure to keep your eyes open [...]
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