Review: Plan to Eat

I know I've talked about how having a meal plan has saved my sanity on more than one occasion. I have in the past, signed up for meal planning services online, but always ended up using a simpler system where I would pick the meals and make my own grocery lists. But then each week, I'd sit in front of a blank sheet of paper (or a new week on my "meals" google calendar) and wonder what we should eat that week. Who knew sustenance would be so much work? You have to consider what you have in the pantry and freezer, how much time you'll have to cook on any given night, the various food preferences and aversions of your family members, and with the price of food these days, what's on sale and whether you are prepared to go to two or three stores just to get the best prices. Then there is the matter of tracking the plan - you want to see it at a glance from your kitchen counter (so you'll remember to take out the chicken to defrost beforehand), you also probably want to be able to access your grocery list when you're on the go, and you may also want to be able to check your menu from work if you are facing unexpected dinner guests. Then there's the cooking process, you need to track your recipes for all but maybe the most common meals that you can make from memory. You want a place to store recipes that you find on Pinterest, in magazines, or that you get emailed to you from a friend. You need to be able to access the recipes in the kitchen, and preferably not have to kill a tree each mealtime by printing them. No wonder people get overwhelmed by the idea!

Enter Plan To Eat.

This one website truly does it all. There are three key stages to the meal planning process on their site. The first is Recipes. Here you can enter in your recipes, either from scratch, or by importing from most* recipe websites such as AllRecipes, FoodNetwork, etc. you can also quickly enter recipes by copy-pasting from an email or other location. Your recipes are categorized and searchable, and you can queue up ones you want to try soon to make them even easier to find. There is a social aspect as well, you can add friends and browse their public recipes and easily add them to your recipe collection too. They have a browser shortcut that you can use when you see a recipe elsewhere, just click "add to an to eat" and it will neatly import the recipe while you keep browsing.

Then you have the Planner. This is a calendar like layout with your recipe inventory on the left. Each day has sections for breakfast, lunch, supper, and snacks. You can easily drag and drop recipes, or add individual ingredients to a day's meal if needed (canned tomato soup, crackers, carrot sticks, anyone?). You can update serving sizes so if you make a big pot of oatmeal at the start of the week you can repeat it in the meal plan daily but set the servings to zero so the site will know you only need to buy the ingredients once. The calendar view can be adjusted to see a lot or just a little, and it does a good job of highlighting the current day so you know where you are at. You can even type in notes in different sections of the day so if you need a further reminder of things that occur in your life that affect meal planning, it's there (6pm swim lesson, for example). There is also a very good feature that lets you copy meals, it's super flexible so you can select what to copy and what day or dates to copy from and to. I really like this feature for planning my kid's school lunches, so I can figure out a week or two of lunches, and then have them repeat for as long as I want to.

So you now have your recipes in place, and your plan set up for the day/week/month. What's next? Grocery shopping, of course. The site has a Shopping List feature that you can customize by selecting which dates on the planner you want to shop for. You can check items off the list if you already have them at home, and take what's left and do your shopping. The shopping list section has a pretty cool pantry feature where you can actually put an inventory of your pantry (or fridge, freezer, etc). This helps you keep track of what's in your house.

One feature that is missing (though the makers of Plan To Eat say they are working on it) is inventory auto management so that if you cook something with items in your pantry, it reduces the quantity you have left. Right now if you want to do that, it's a manual process. There is a neat pantry related feature though that is called "cook from my pantry". It's exactly what it sounds like, it compares your pantry to recipes in your recipe section, and finds things you can cook with the ingredients you have on hand.

All in all, Plan to Eat is the most comprehensive meal planning site that I've used so far, and I like it enough that I signed up for a year of usage. The first 30 days are a fully featured free trial, and you don't have to give your credit card info to sign up so it truly is risk free. I think I paid maybe $40 for a year of service and I found this pretty reasonable. I still use it weekly and I love the fact I can access my recipes and meal plan from anywhere. I've checked it from my computer at work, from my iPad in the kitchen, and from my phone on the road or in the grocery store. If you want to try Plan ToEat for yourself, you can go right to their site, or you can help me out by clicking through on this referral link (http://plantoeat.com/ref/q8aygx1zcq) to sign up. If you wish, you can also add me as a friend and we can share recipes. Happy planning!