I feel like I'm really not organized when it comes to planning the household chores. OK, I don't plan at all, really. One thing I've been the most terrible at since having my second child (uh, 11 months ago) is meal planning. I did a post on how I've done my meal planning in the past. You might have noticed it was fairly labor-intensive. I have enjoyed E-Mealz in many ways and I've got some really good recipes from that site. However, they seem to focus mainly on Mexican food, salads, and white sauces for vegetarians. I like Mexican food as much as the next person, but vegetarians DO eat things other than Mexican, E-Mealz! And no one in my house will eat white sauce or salad of any kind except me. It also seemed that most of their recipes were actually meat recipes with fake-meat substitutes thrown in. Have you ever tasted fake meat products? They are disgusting. So we had to avoid most of those recipes too. Ultimately, I could only use about 1-2 recipes from each 5-day meal plan.
Through the new ad network I've signed up with, I have just learned about Food on the Table, another meal-planning program that also has a corresponding iPhone app. I think this might be what I am missing! Having a dedicated app saves me several steps in my previous process in migrating the meal plan to my iPhone so I can take the shopping list to the store.
I tried Food on the Table this week and here are the pros and cons:
Pros:
- When they say it's a 60-second signup, they're not kidding!
- The limited version of the service is free (I was paying $5/month for E-Mealz). To get access to more recipes, you can pay to upgrade to Premium which is $5/month for the first 3 months and $9.95/month for the future. Less if you pay quarterly or for a whole year.
- Online or iPhone app interface is convenient
- When you select the stores you shop at, it automatically finds the sales and you can pick recipes based on the items on sale at the store you are going to!
- You can restrict recipes by prep time, by what kind of meat or Meatless
- You can add additional non-menu items to the grocery list in the iPhone app. It even has a voice recognition option so you can add items without typing. When I spoke "organic milk" it not only added it correctly, and in the correct category on the list, but also suggested the item was on sale at the Tom Thumb I selected as my favorite store. OMG LOVE!!
- Side items are chosen separately from the main dish so it's up to you to figure out how to pair things. This is actually just fine with me, because I rarely used the side item recommendations with E-Mealz. (side note: vegetarians don't eat coleslaw for side-dishes at every meal, E-Mealz)
NOTE: As an ad network affiliate, I get something like $1 if you actually buy the Premium version by clicking one of my links.
