Q: One of my resolutions is to be more methodical about my cooking, eating, and spending. I'd like to eat healthy meals while keeping to my limited budget and I want a system to help me set out what I'm going to eat for a week, keep track of things I've liked, and if possible, catalogue my pantry items.
Short of creating some annoying Excel spreadsheet, do your readers know of any sites, programs, or tools that could assist me in this adventure? If there isn't a program, does anyone have suggestions for creating such a system? I've never been able to stick to tracking my spending or my meals for more than a couple days.
Sent by Jeni
Editor: Readers, do you know of any tools that help with tracking meal planning and spending?
Related: 15 Tips for Better Weekly Meal Planning
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I found Pepperplate (http://www.pepperplate.com/) to be really useful for keeping my recipes organized!
Ziplist!!!
Well I don't know if it's exactly what you have in mind, but I have found Microsoft OneNote to be incredibly helpful for my meal planning (amongst other things). For reference, I cook for 2 people and make about 3 meals a week, which we stretch to leftovers for the other days. I grocery shop once a week and always have a plan.
I have a Notebook section entirely dedicated to recipes.It is broken up by Meats & Main Dishes, Vegetables & Soups, Sides, Breads, and Desserts. I also created a section for weekly Menus. It would be great for grocery lists, but I like to jot those down by hand. I use my local store's weekly ads to pick out my main dishes, then flesh out the meal plans in OneNote based on sales or whatever I have in the pantry.
I can copy recipes from food blogs or websites, or transfer and tweak recipes from cookbooks/magazines. Re-writing them in OneNote give a good mental run-through of a recipe. It's easy to throw in notes after I've tried something and easy to delete any major failures from the repertoire. Obviously this indicates that I keep my laptop handy in the kitchen when I'm cooking. I don't mind that at all, but it may not work for others.
OneNote also allows basic tables so you could create a section to track your weekly grocery spending. It's a very flexible, useful tool... It changed the way I work at work and I continually find ways to better organize my personal life with it. The Recipes section works great for me.
Hands down for expenses I use Expensify- you can set it up to automatically read from any/all of yours, generate IRS acceptable cash transaction receipts, make notes, and set up rules to automatically organize expenses as they occur into specific categories. For example, I set mine up to automatically move certain things to my full time job report, contracted job report, small business report (yeah, I have 3 jobs), medical expenses report, vacation report, known tax deductions (car registration anmd tax prep fees) report.
It's amazing!!!!!
For food- Live Strong MyPlate. It has a huge database to search from to easily log, plus you can save all your recipe so you can include that in your tracking with ease!
I use pepperplate also to keep my recipes together (and I really like it) and it has a nice meal planning tool.
Check out this post...
http://www.thekitchn.com/5-online-meal-and-menu-planning-tools-169221
Mastercook has an option for ingredient pricing. You can also create menus, create shopping lists from menus, and so in addition to recipe cards, recipe collections/cookbooks. Nutritional info can be entered and then shown to you.
The recipes for healthier eating can be entered by you along with any pantry items.
Google Calendar for meal planning, Wunderlist for everything else. Wunderlist!! https://www.wunderlist.com/
I love Wunderlist! I use it for absolutely everything.
I don't have anything for meal planning (though that is something I'd be interested in finding out too!). But for spending and budgeting, I've been using You Need a Budget or YNAB as it's also known for the past year. It's really helped me get back on track and stay that way. My food expenses have been the areas where I really needed help sticking to a set budget and YNAB made it a lot easier for me. http://www.youneedabudget.com/
I second this!
I use LivingCookbook, which is fantastic for recipe saving/organizing and nutrition information. They also have a meal-planning, pricing function, but I haven't personally used it.
Good Luck!
I second LivingCookbook. I've been using it since 2008 and recently upgraded to the 2013 version. You can plan meals, enter product prices and create shopping lists. The recipe capture option is also fantastic, making it very easy to save recipes found online to your recipe books. You can add comments, your own photos and rate your recipes. They have several video tutorials on their site, so you can see the software in action before buying it.
Mint won't help with meal planning, but it's beyond amazing in regards to finances and you'll be able to track what you're spending at the grocery, fast food, restaurants, etc...
www.soscuisine.com