Need help organizing your recipes and planning a menu? These seven sites and smartphone apps will help you get organized:
1. Evernote (free): The most popular recipe and menu organizing app we know of. Don't miss The Kitchn's review of Evernote and the ways we rely on it in the kitchen! Evernote even wrote a blog post on using the app for recipes and meal planning.
2. Springpad (free): Springpad, the online note-keeping system, has a special section devoted to planning weekly meals and grocery shopping. See The Kitchn's review of Springpad here, and for a look at how to set up Springpad specifically for menu planning, see this post from the company blog.
3. MealBoard Meal and Grocery Planner App ($1.99 on iTunes): Helps you organize your meals by day of the week and meal type. Kitchn reader farmersdaughter says this about Meal Board:
I use the iPhone app 'Meal Board' for meal planning and grocery list. You can enter in your own recipe ingredient lists (online using your computer or on the phone using the app) and plan meals using the recipes you enter. The planner will show up to 2 weeks at a time. You then can synch the meal plan with the grocery list and will pull all the ingredients you identified as necessary for a recipe and populate it into the grocery list. And you can add your own items to the grocery list that may not appear as an ingredient in a recipe. All in all it's a pretty nice app.
4. Food on the Table (free): an online budget meal planning service that matches weekly sales from your local grocery store with your food preferences.
5. Menu Planner App ($2.99 on iTunes): Helps you create meal plans, import recipes from your favorite sites, keep track of what's in your pantry, and integrate it all into a shopping list.
6. Plan to Eat ($4.95/month): the heart of this website is its Monthly Meal Planner, which lets you drag recipes from your Recipe Book to create a meal plan, to which you can add special events, additional ingredients, or notes.
7. PepperPlate Recipe, Menu, and Cooking Planner (free): The menu planning and cooking mode lets you plan menus and add them to a schedule, create shopping lists, and organize the list around the way you shop in your grocery store. Kitchn reader silverfire4200 says about the app:
I am a big fan of PepperPlate. It allows you to import recipes from just about every other recipe site and has a handy bookmark button to add to your browser. Comes complete with a menu planner and a shopping list. The website will sync to your iThing app and you have it all with you! If I had a tablet of some kind I would be more inclined to NOT print the recipe that I was about to assemble, but for the time being I print and store in a binder that lives on top of my microwave."
Are there any websites or apps you rely on to help you plan meals and menus?
Related: Best Way to Organize Recipes from Many Sources?
(Image: Michal Czerwonka/WSJ via The Kitchn)
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I already use Evernote to keep track of my recipes, but I recently discovered 'Say Mmm', which is an Evernote add-on. Once you download it, you give recipe(s) you've chosen the 'Say Mmm' tag and it automatically generates a grocery list of all the ingredients!
You can check it out here: http://www.saymmm.com/evernote.php
Hey! That's me :) Too cool
I love Springpad! They just had a huge update, so we'll see how that plays out (for better or worse).
I use a small combination of websites and services. Allrecipe, evernote, and pearltrees. Each has it's own use and this seems to serve me very well.
Allrecipes.com: nice website to search recipes according to ingredients I have
Evernote: Store recipes and scans from parents/friends/etc without much hassle
Pearltrees.com: Easy way to organize website recipes until I can get them into Evernote
Evernote is blocked at my work and Allrecipes doesn't have a great way to enter recipes quickly. The usage of these three is awesome.
Thank you for this post!! I'm already a HUGE Evernote fan/user. This year I have a personal goal to scan all of my photos. I've added recipes to the list. I'll start with the recipe cards and move to my favorite cook book recipes.
Thank you MRSTIFFSMITH for sharing the "Say Mmm" add on. I'll give it a try.
I've been using Our Groceries (free Android app), and I'm really enjoying it. You can make any kind of list you want and create categories for the lists (such as the aisles in the grocery store). The thing I like the best about it is the ability to enter all the ingredients for a recipe and save it. I can then choose the recipe and tell it which ingredients to add to the grocery list.
You can also work with the lists through the website, and you can share it with any number of people you want to.
And no, I don't work for the company or get a kickback in any way. I just love it.
I love Springpad. I can add recipes to my cookbook with one click (well, actually two!) and use the pin board to visualize menus.
I tried a few options and settled on Pinterest. It's been really fun and is doing the job for me. I didn't really want something to generate a grocery list, but just to catalog recipes. I get most of my pins from posts here!
i use springpad too, my favorite is that it syncs up nicely. my partner also has the app on his phone, i can make a shopping list and he can shop from it, which is super cool. I usually make it a task list tho as its easier to load, see the list, and check things off while at the store. You can also easily re-add items to your list if they are weekly staples
I use a combination of Eat Your Books and Pinterest.
EYB is getting me using my cookbooks that I spent all that money on. Pinterest is great for finding new ideas.
I keep track of ideas on Pinterest, but then I track the foods I eat on Spark People. When I make a complicated (or really just multi-ingredient) recipe I enter it into Spark Recipes and then add it to my food tracker. I know it's not technically a "meal planner", but by pre-entering my food for the upcoming week it does make a plan- a plan that shows how well I'm meeting my nutritional needs.
After trying out pretty much all options out there, I settled on this combination, which suits my needs perfectly: Pinterest for browsing, ChefTap for saving/following recipes, and Any.DO for grocery lists. ChefTap is a recipe app which allows one to automatically import recipes for almost any source (including Pinterest boards), add tags and images, etc.
Hi Cambria,
I truly believe in the power of meal planning. I went on to create my own meal planning application (with a little help!). It's called Siansplan.com, and it's different to some of the above because it was created by home cooks, for home cooks. It's based on our Meal plan in colour philosophy, which is flexible to a families needs. I really think that's important. Heres a fun little video to illustrate what it is Meal plan in colour illustration. Hope you like it!
Plan To Eat rocks! I use this website every week to plan meals on Thursday for the following week. The grocery list it compiles (broken out by grocery store aisle even!) is terrific and goes with me that following day as I complete my weekly shopping. You can even break your list out by different stores, if you want to. I am on the site almost daily because all I have to do is click on the meal planned for the evening and the recipe pops up. When I find a recipe I like online, all I have to do is click the icon in my favorites bar and it automatically imports the recipe into Plan To Eat so it is waiting for me the next time I plan meals. A real time saver!
I absolutely love Plan to Eat. I keep all my recipes in it now and the meal planning/shopping list generation is fantastic. And it's a small shop and they love feedback, so it's great to feel like you're being heard. Even my husband loves it :) The mobile app is great for pulling up recipes on my phone when I'm cooking or the shopping list when I hit the store.
Seriously, it's changed our lives. We even love the "cook from my pantry" which allows you to figure out which recipes you already have the ingredients for based on what you've got in your pantry. 30-day free trial was more than I needed to get hooked.
Plan to Eat is awesome! It covers all the basics - meal planning, recipes, grocery list - and even tracks what I already have in my pantry. You can even import recipes off the web. I've never seen any other resource that's as comprehensive (or easy to use) as Plan to Eat. It's definitely saving me a ton of time when meal planning since my recipes are all right there on the website. Check out their FREE one month trial...that's what got me hooked! And no, they're not paying me to say all of this. I'm just one very satisfied customer. :-)
Food on the Table is not free. It costs $15 to join and about $10 a month after that.
I use No Fuss Menus (www.nofussmenus.com) for my menu planning. They email healthy menu plans and recipes to you weekly. There is a free trial as well.
I love the app Paprika for my meal planning and recipe storage. It's $4.99 in the iTunes app store.
I have a weekly meal tool for Excel.
Features
- adding new meals
- search by keyword
- search by labels
- generate a random week
- fully modifiable file and script
- free
http://users.telenet.be/bulevardi/?page=exvb8
Jus try it
I am looking for a flexible, customizable meal planning service that will generate grocery lists and that dont lock me in to their menu plan for the week. Two services I am testing out are "The Scramble" and "no nore to go".
I've definitely used services in the past like Evernote to track my recipes. I've noticed that everyone's posting meal planning websites that focus on families - as a single guy, a lot of these sites aren't appropriate for my needs.
I created a website that provides meal plans for busy professionals such as myself. All the recipes can be made in 30 minutes or less, and it really cuts down wasted time and $ on grocery shopping and restaurants.
Check it out! www.mealime.com