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Meal Planning Tool: Springpad

2009_02_02-springpad.jpgSpringpad is an online note-keeping system designed to keep you more organized, and it has a special section just for planning weekly meals and groceries. Check it out...

 
 

We'll admit, we tend to be pretty haphazard about our shopping and meal planning. We swing by the farmers' market, grocery store, bodega on the corner, etc. almost daily, never quiet knowing what we want to cook until a few hours before.

Most of you are more organized (just read the comments on this post). But for those of us who would like to be more deliberate about our meals and more efficient in our shopping, Springpad is a pretty cool tool.

You set up a free account, then go to your Weekly Meal Planner, where you can list what recipe you're making each night. It's almost a day planner of sorts; if you're going out, you can list the website of the restaurant.

We really like how easy it is to cut and paste recipes from the web. You copy the URL and Springpad loads the recipe, plus the ingredients list. Then you can drag and drop ingredients into a grocery list for the week. One glitch we've found is that it copies ingredients into the grocery list word for word. So, say you need 2 tablespoons of butter for Monday's dish and half a stick of butter for something on Tuesday. You'll have both items in your list and would need to consolidate manually. We do like how you can make separate lists for different stores, though.

We haven't spent a ton of time playing around (that's a quick hypothetical we created, above)—and, given our iPod-less life, don't know how well this works with mobile devices—but we're hopeful this might make our weekly cooking less hectic.

Check it out and let us know what you think: springpad
Meal Planners at springPad

Related: Creative Meal Planning from Cookthink

(Image: Springpad)

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Organization, Website for Cooks, meal planning, Springpad

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Comments (4)

Basic quick-testing: seems quite useful, especially for the way I currently have to plan meals. The only catch with the recipe import process is that it has to be in recognizable recipe format, and cannot be a pdf. Some of the Pioneer Woman's recipes, for example, it just can't work with.

But, seeing as I usually modify things anyway, I don't mind typing it my own self, or cutting and pasting. I'm also intrigued by a few other of the 'springpads.' Thanks for the link!

posted by thygatromedea on February 2nd 2009 at 3:31pm
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Overall.... not an efficient tool for meal-planning for those of us who use the "stockpile" method, meaning that at any given time, I have a weird, random collection of ingredients in my cupboard. It's far easier for me to use an ingredient search on AllRecipes.com and print, then circle outstanding ingredients and list substitutions in the margins.

If they ever integrate with a recipe site and/or allow remote-interaction through an IM program or mail-to-site widget, I'm so in, though, because a lot of the stuff looks really useful. It would be an easy process to dump everything into your "main" area, and then drag and drop into the appropriate places by hand.

posted by bfootnovellista on February 3rd 2009 at 2:23pm
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We're working on a new version of the springpad meal planner. So, if you've got any suggestions for improvements, please let me know.

katin@springpartners.com

posted by katin from springpad on May 12th 2009 at 8:30am
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Would be very useful to organize the shopping list into categories! Also, from Food Network I haven't been able to get the whole recipe to load -- it only load a link for the directions.

posted by Lewi Wedi on May 20th 2009 at 4:34pm
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