Meal planning in the digital age

One of the few household maintenance tasks at which I don’t totally suck is planning meals. I started doing this both to save money and stop throwing out food that had gone bad. I plan the weeks’ meals on Sunday night and shop on Monday, trying to take advantage of items we already have in the house as well as what’s on sale. An added bonus: the less time you have to spend grocery shopping with kid(s) in tow, the better.

My Google Doc template for meal planning.

Lately I’ve been happy to find several free (or very low cost) online tools that help me do that, so I thought I’d share. I’ve tried a couple of the online meal-planning websites, but, in my experience, they are expensive and require either that you spend a lot of time putting in your own recipes and information, or the meals they offer are too limited to be useful to us.

First, I found a great meal-planning spreadsheet template on Google Docs for writing up my weekly meal plan. (Mine is very similar to this template, but my template author has taken the original one out of the database.) In addition to space for writing out my entrees and sides for each meal and day, there’s a space to include notes and links to the original recipes as well as a shopping list. I like having it saved on Google Docs because I can access it from my smartphone if I forget my shopping list. And, if I see something while I’m out shopping that might work better for a particular night (or if our plans change) I can edit on the fly.

Go-To Recipe Sites

My mainstays for finding fast, easy and somewhat interesting (also kid-friendly) recipes are Food.com (I’ve been a user since it was known as Recipezaar—my username is Lazycat, if you want to look me up) and Punchfork (username: SlowCat, see the theme?). Food.com lets you browse thousands of recipes, read reviews by others who have tried them, and upload your own. And on weeks when “the plan” goes south, I can punch in ingredients that I have on hand and usually find something decent to make.

Punchfork is great for finding new recipes. It’s basically a search engine for food blogs and it generates results based on what is “trending” — the recipes that are getting the most response or positive reviews all around the Internet.

Still to Try

A couple of people have told me they really like using SpringPad for menu planning. That they use it to keep track of recipes they want to try, compose shopping lists and generate a meal plan document. I still want to try this, but haven’t had much luck getting SpringPad to work for me for other things. I need some kind of remedial SpringPad training. I just end up with one notebook full of random links and photos. I’m not getting how the software is supposed to help you with organizing. I’m going to try one of their tutorials and see if it helps.

What about you, any websites that you love for finding recipes or planning meals? Leave yours in the comments.

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