Meal Planning Apps for Working Moms
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Ladies, do you have any favorite meal planning apps? Have you tried and abandoned any? Reader M wonders:
Are there any resources that you have gathered/written about for meal planning for working moms? I am looking for a good app or system that will help!
We actually have talked about this a lot, rounding up 5 family dinner strategies better than delivery, how to share dinner duties between two working parents, how to plan dinner every night, easy weeknight dinners, meal planning apps, repeating recipes vs trying new ones, meal prepping, and the best meal-kit services.
Our Attempts at Regular Family Dinners
We keep trying different things family dinner strategies at Casa Griffin.
We fell off The Fresh 20 because the meal prep was just too involved for the time we wanted to invest — we also don’t eat at home reliably 5 nights a week, and adjusting the shopping list to only 4 nights took a surprising amount of thought.
Prior to that we had a system of just cooking 10 easy meals “on rotation,” but we got bored with that. I, too, was seeking an app that would help with meal planning, shopping lists, and also hold the recipe so I could consult it if I needed to in the store. (Or am I the only one who, when faced with a food item I can’t find, consults the recipe and says, “well, screw it, they only want 1Tbsp of shallots anyway!” and moves on?)
{related: here’s how I plan dinner every night, i.e. Lego Planning}
The Best Meal Planning Apps for Working Moms
I really like the free app we’ve found: Pepperplate. It has a web version, as well as an app for my iPhone and my iPad, and I’ve set it up on my husband’s phone as well (which gives him ready access to the recipes and shopping lists as well). The program can import recipes from some of its partner sites (allegedly), but it’s also easy enough to add recipes manually.
(I like that you can add a picture — they’re always my favorite part when looking for recipes!)
When you’re sitting down to do the meal planning for the week you add a specific recipe to a calendar, making it easy for your partner or a helpful third party (nanny, au pair, whomever) to know what the plan is for that night. And one of the things I like best is that you can add all of the recipe ingredients to a single shopping list where items are grouped by general grocery store section (dairy, meat, etc) and consolidated.
(You can also pick and choose which ingredients to add to the shopping list, which is always helpful when you already have 60% of what you need in the house.)
One tip: I keep a backup of all my recipes in B-Folders (which doesn’t have an iPhone app, so it can’t quite serve the same purpose). Both in Pepperplate and in B-Folders, I organize recipes by putting the meal in the title of the recipe, so if I’m sorting by alphabet I see all of my BF (breakfast) or MD (main dishes) together.
I also put notations like MD:CP in the main title (so all of my crockpot main dishes are together), and I tag them with words like “slow cooker, clean, low carb, etc” since I sometimes go on and off different eating regimens. (Pictured: Spicy pork posole, from Self magazine many moons ago!)
This Lifehacker article rounds up some other apps, including the Lifehacker reader favorite, CookSmarts (currently $6-$8 a month). Ladies, what meal planning apps do you use? If you’re still on the hunt, what are you looking for in one? If you’ve found a system other than an app, what do you use?
Social media picture credit: Pixabay.
Hey Kat!
Great post. Have you heard of Meal Garden? (home.mealgarden.com) It is a meal assistant tool with emphasis on healthy eating. What makes Meal Garden so great is that it provides a full nutritional breakdown for every recipe in the system (even the ones you import). We also provide full customer assistance to help users meet their meal planning goals, with access to nutritionists and health coaches.
I think it would be worth checking out. The tool is $5.95/month or $45/annually, but there is a trial period at the beginning.
We tried Fresh20 and found the instructions were meh. We are using Cook Smarts right now and like that the portions are adjustable (though we are still on the free sample). We may try the Six O’Clock scramble also before signing up for one, just to have really done the research. (most of these sites provide a few free meal plans so you can try it out).
I adore Plan to Eat. It’s a yearly subscription ($40 maybe?) You can easily import recipes from blogs/web pages using a bookmarklet (or enter them manually), then you drag the recipes onto a calendar to plan for the week. You can then flip back through your weekly calendars, which I do sometimes if I want to remember what I made when so-and-so last came over so I don’t repeat it. It even makes a grocery list based on what you have planned, although we use Our Groceries. I’ve been using it for a year and I can’t imagine meal planning without it.
Sounds like I need to get on the technology bandwagon! Isn’t that why I bought a $500+ phone? Thus far, my husband and I have been keeping a word doc list of recipes and have an excel spreadsheet grocery list template I found a couple years ago that groups foods by section in the store. But we manually have to look up the recipes once we decide on the menu to add all the ingredients. At first glance, Pepperplate looks pretty awesome. I will definitely look into it and other apps mentioned here. Thank you!
I did a lot of research on this topic a few years ago and ended up choosing macgourmet. I mainly cook from cookbooks and old recipes so I didnt want to just use an internet clipper or something with preset recipes. I also wanted something I could use on my mac computer and not just on my phone. I only considered software that would allow me to select recipes for a week and then create a grocery list, organized by store. There arent that many such options or at least there weren’t at the time. I dont love the software, it’s a little clunky and not updated enough, and the app is awful, but I could not find anything better, and it functions well for my purposes. At the beginning I typed up the recipes i use from cookbooks, which was a process (I mostly did it during the year I clerked and worked 9-5 but it would also be a good maternity leave project.) Now I just go in and add new recipes I come across. It’s compatible with Paprika, which I use to have the recipes on my phone.
For recipe storage and making grocery lists from them I use Paprika. I really like the format of the app to use while cooking, and the grocery lists are pretty ok, although their sorting isn’t quite the same categories as my grocery store, which is annoying.
I checked the Fresh 20 cookbook out of the library, which I’m glad I did before subscribing because I’m a fairly picky eater and there was only one week where I really liked the whole menu. We also don’t eat at home 5 meals a week and I agree it was just as much work to separate out the grocery list for only some meals, which defeated a lot of the purpose. I did put a decent number of the Fresh 20 recipes into Paprika though, and a few have made it on to our rotation.
One system we’ve fallen off and on the bandwagon for is a theme for each day of the week, like: Pasta Monday, Stir Fry and Rice Tuesday, Breakfast for dinner Thursday, Pizza Friday. It’s nice in that you don’t have to really think hard about dinner but it’s not always exactly the same and means that you just have to keep the pantry stocked with the same basics (pasta, rice, etc).
And I also say “oh leaving out the shallots is fine, whatever!” and substitute things like garlic powder for garlic and frozen orange juice concentrate for fresh squeezed orange juice. For most meals, I’m taking the recipe as a guideline, not a hard and fast truth.
But my husband is out of town tonight, so we are having delivery pizza, and that’s as much planning as I’ve done.
We are a Lighter household. We do their 9 meals a week (4 lunches and 5 dinners) for two people (totally enough food for two people and a toddler), and it comes out to $107 per week. They send groceries directly through Instacart and create a meal plan based on your likes/dislikes/goals/allergies.
They are entirely plant-based, so no meat, eggs, dairy, fish, etc.
LOVE it.
Evernote! It’s not recipe-specific but I love the functionality and flexibility. I save each recipes as a “note” and can tag them (one pot, protein, side dish, slow cooker), etc. Each week I move my planned meals into the “This Week” folder — this syncs to our ipad, iphones, and desktops so both my husband and I have access. I do the grocery list manually in AnyList (which also syncs to everything), but I don’t find it too time-consuming.
It’s not strictly for meal planning, but I’ve been using Our Groceries for a few years. It’s free and accessible via web or mobile (my husband and I both have it on our phones). You can categorize items into groups like fruits, dairy, etc, and even adjust the order those categories appear in on your shopping list so that it matches your store layout. You can also save your favorite recipes manually, then add all the related ingredients to your shopping list with one click.
We do it the analog way ;)
We make a meal plan, then make a grocery list by hand. We post the meal plan on the fridge and stack the cookbooks (with bookmark) or printed digital recipe on the kitchen desk.
Hi ladies, I’m sorry to go OT right away but I’d love some advice please! We’re expecting our second at the end of March. Our toddler will be 2.5 and it’s looking increasingly likely that my husband will be out of commission recovering from back surgery around the time of my due date. Toddler will continue at day care 5 days/week, full days if needed. I had a c section the first time around and while so far VBAC is still a strong possibility, it’s reasonable to expect that I may be recovering from surgery as well. My parents are in town but are CPAs and are totally off the grid in late March/early April due to tax time. ILs live out of town and can’t take the time off of work, and wouldn’t be helpful anyway.
So, I’m thinking about hiring some help in some capacity, at least for the first few weeks to help us get through the really rough patch when DH and I may both be more or less out of commission physically. Has anyone done something like this? Would you recommend day or night help? We can afford either, and could dip into savings to do both if it was really truly essential, but I’m hoping that’s not needed. What kind of help would you even look for- baby nurse? Postpartum doula? How do you find these people? When is the best time to start looking? I’m so out of my depth here and don’t know where to start. Any thoughts/advice would be super appreciated!