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Dinner Planning Help

About a year ago I started searching for a website or book that would give me tasty and quick recipes to make for a whole week along with a shopping list for the ingredients. I thought that it would be great to just photocopy or print a shopping list and not have to think about meal planning or list-making. What a tall order this seemingly simple want turned out to be! I will share my results with you here. Please let me know if there are any services or cookbooks that I have missed out on!

DinnerPlanner - This is a great website that you should definitely check out.  They even have a free week’s worth of menus (and the shopping list) to try out. The service costs $15 for 3 months worth of recipes delivered to your email. I paid for it and made most of the meals during my 3 months. Things we liked: not planning meals, not planning the shopping list, pretty good recipes most of the time plus a few standouts. Things we didn’t like: the recipes take 30 minutes to 1 hour to make.

SavingDinner- This website is more professionally done than DinnerPlanner’s and has a lot more menu-types to choose from (like heart-healthy, frugal, lunch, kid-friendly, etc.). The service generally costs $10 for 3 months of recipes and shopping lists. I only tested the sample menu, about a year ago, so I can’t vouch for the rest of the menus and recipes. The reason we chose the other service was that the recipes took over an hour to make and we didn’t necessarily even like them better. The sample menu has changed since then so perhaps you would get a different result.

The Weeknight Survival Cookbook: How to Make Healthy Meals in 10 Minutes - My sister gave us this book when we were so busy with our work and our little ones that we were barely able to get ourselves fed. I have to say that it is a really good book overall. First off, the meals seriously only take 10 minutes, which is absolutely wonderful for busy people like us! (The Sunday meals take longer though.) Second, it reuses food in order to minimize your cooking. Like this: it has you make 2x the potatoes that you need one night and the left-overs go into the potato-broccoli soup the next night. You get 3 months of recipes and shopping lists. We have gone through most of the weeks. What we liked: super fast and easy meals, no planning needed, nutritious and balanced, spent a lot less money on food because these are cheap meals. What we didn’t like: the food is decent but not great.