Love to cook, hate to plan.....

I know, I know....it's been months since my last blog. That's part of my problem, I am really bad with finding time to do all the things I want to do....

...and my post title is a little off....I do love to cook, and I actually like to plan too, I'm just horribly bad about it. It's a little bit of ADD and a whole lot of a crazy life that gets in the way. But the thing is, I NEED to plan my family's meals so that we don't end up just picking up something or going to an actual restaurant. And like I said, I actually like planning meals. It's just so time consuming to look through all my recipes, write the ones I want in a calendar, and then make up a shopping list. Because it requires at least a little bit of undivided attention (which is in short supply many times), it often doesn't get done, and therefor it's either eating out or really quick (and not the healthiest) meals at home. I am quite envious of my friends who this comes easy to.....they have no problems making a meal plan with paper and pencil. But I was not gifted that way in the least bit. Considering my affinity for all things high tech, I decided that was the route to go in finding help with my meal-planning woes!

Quite a few months ago, I found a wonderful site www.e-mealz.com. It is a GREAT meal-planning site, but it is a service that provides preplanned meals with recipes and a shopping list included. I still highly recommend this service, and I used it for about 6 months, but what I REALLY wanted was a meal-planning service that allowed me to enter my OWN recipes.

So for quite a few months now, I've been looking for a good meal-planning program or website that meets my needs. First, it has to be easy to use, almost as easy as having it preplanned for me like e-mealz. But specifically, it needed to be easy to import recipes. I have quite a few recipes stored in Word documents, plus I LOVE LOVE LOVE www.allrecipes.com to find great recipes. I also visit several cooking blogs and find recipes there as well as always copying recipes that get posted on Facebook or shared at church gatherings. So, I needed a program that was very easy to import or input all those recipes. I also wanted something that made it super-easy to do the actual weekly planning. Finally, I wanted a really easy to use shopping list. I was willing to pay for something like this (if it worked, it would be saving me lots of money), although I wanted the price to be reasonable. I also wanted to be able to try it out with full functionality before I had to pay for it.

So, after looking at just about everything there was out there, online and off, I finally found my ideal meal planning help in Plan to Eat.

Plan to Eat is a web-based program that allows you to enter recipes, share recipes with your friends, drag and drop recipes into a calendar for meal planning (so easy!) and then generate a shopping list (you set the dates that you want the list for) for your meal plan. It is SUPER easy to enter recipes, and you can group them by course, cuisine, and/or your own keywords. This makes it incredibly easy to pull up what you are looking for to add to your calendar. For instance, say I want a Mexican chicken dish. All I have to do is pull up main course, and then narrow it to Mexican, and then keyword chicken. Voila! Chicken enchiladas it is (or whatever recipes that you've entered for those categories)! It is super easy to import recipes from other websites too. All you have to do is enter the web address for the page the recipe is on, and it auto adds the recipe. It's very cool, trust me!

The drag and drop feature for adding items to your calendar makes things SO easy too! The recipes are listed on the side and you drag them over to your calendar. You can also add individual items to your calendar such as "canned peas" or "frozen broccoli" that you don't need a recipe for, but they are auto added to your shopping list. You even have the option of posting non-food things on your calendar that might affect your meal planning, such as an evening school event or even a reminder to defrost something for the next day. I LOVE this feature! You can also save a group of meal plans for later if you want. For instance, if you have a really good week of meals planned, you can save the whole week and use the same plan again at a later time. You set the dates, so you can save as many or a few days as you want.

The shopping list is great as well. Items are auto added and grouped into grocery store categories (you can change the category if you don't like where it puts it). You can remove items that you already have, and put them back on the list if you change your mind. You can set the dates of the shopping list to whatever you like, depending on your shopping preferences. You can also set it up to have lists for separate stores, but I haven't used this feature. Another nifty feature is that there is a mobile website where you can access just your active shopping list from your phone. You just pull up the site and when you put the item in your cart, you check the item off the list and it disappears. I find this to be SO handy since I don't have to print off a list (although you can) and then keep up with it!

Plan to Eat does have a subscription charge of $5/month or $39/year, but they do give you a whole 30 DAYS to try a fully-functional site for FREE without ever entering your credit card. I tried it for 2 weeks and knew that it was exactly what I was looking for. I went ahead and signed up for the year subscription, but they are still giving me the rest of my 30 day trial for free. That's pretty cool too!

So, if you are like me and have the best intentions but need a little help with meal planning, you might check out Plan to Eat. If you do try it out, let me know what you think. We can even share meals using their recipe sharing tools!