Last week I gave some helpful tips for meal planning. It can still feel a little overwhelming, so now I want to share my very favorite tool to menu plan. I’m sharing it because I love y’all and I believe that life can be easier than we make it sometimes.

Overcoming Obstacles to Menu Planning

Sometimes we gather great ideas, but for some reason we don’t implement them. Meal planning is a great idea, and as a mom with 4 kids, it has been essential to maintaining my sanity and keeping us fed. But it is a habit that has to be built.

If you are new to menu planning or want to streamline your process, let’s take just a minute to investigate whether you have a mental road block when it comes to planning meals.

It takes too much time. Would you believe me when I say I plan my week’s meals and grocery list in under 10 minutes? Or sometimes I plan a whole month of suppers in about 25 minutes?

Menu planning makes me feel locked in. Being spontaneous is kind of fun, but when I wait until about 5 PM, it is better described as desperation. I’d rather use my creativity elsewhere. My favorite meal plan tool allows you to reschedule with a simple click.

It feels overwhelming. This was my biggest blockade. It was so much work to pull out the cookbooks, I would get lost on Pinterest, and it’s a hassle to transfer all the ingredients into the grocery list. It took far more time and effort than it should have to pull together meals for the week.

It really is kind of hard to make a grocery list on paper, plan out what you’ll eat when, then scratch things out and rearrange them when you remember what is actually going on during the week. Then pray you don’t misplace the list.

Like many others, I’ve gone fully digital.

Plan to Eat Meal Plan Service

I’ve been using Plan to Eat for almost 7 years–since before they even had an app. This is one subscription I’ve renewed again and again. We even stopped our Netflix subscription when we were hard core budgeting–but I was not going to cut my meal plan.

Once a year, they offer a sale, and that sale is happening this weekend. Friday, November 29 – Monday, December 2, 2019, they are offering 50% off the annual subscription. It’s normally $39/year, or monthly for $4.95/month; but this sale brings it to $19.50/year. That is less than $2/month!

It is worth every penny to me. I rarely pay for services, but this is one that saves me so much time each week, and because I know clearly what I am serving my family each week, it saves money on groceries, (or take-out) too.

You can try Plan to Eat for free. They offer a 30 day free trial, with no credit card required. (However, if you love it, you’ll have to decide to take advantage of the sale by Tuesday, December 2.)

They have a desktop site and an app that flows beautifully on both iOS and Android (I’ve used it with both type of phone).

It is simple to enter recipes manually (for family recipes or your own inventions).

It is even simpler to import recipes from the internet. It’s a matter of copying and pasting a link, and clicking the ‘Import’ button. Nearly everything can be found with a quick google search.

From there, you simply drag and drop saved recipes into the calendar.

My Favorite Features

This is my favorite part: Once the calendar has recipes in it, the ingredients are immediately added to the shopping list. The list is easy to read, you can arrange it by store and by category, and as I mark the items off, they drop off my list until it’s empty. It’s the little things, guys.

My other favorite feature is the “recipe queue” where I like to list our favorite recipes. It creates a sub-database, where our standards can be easy to find for quick planning. I have over 300 recipes, most of them “main courses” so it can take a minute to scroll through. (I’ll share them with you!)

You can add notes and ingredients into the calendar. You might not need a recipe for “baked squash” or “rice” but when you add those as ingredients, they can show as part of the day’s menu; they will appear in the shopping list as well.

That calendar can even be synced to your google calendar or your iCal. I can ask my virtual assistant, “Siri, what’s on my calendar tomorrow?” and she tells me what I’m planning to make for dinner. What a time to be alive!

It is easy to rearrange the meals once you have them in place. On desktop you drag and drop. On the app you select the recipe and choose reschedule to move it to another meal slot.

Plan to Eat also has a freezer category to keep track of what’s in your freezer. I can mark that I am preparing a meal (or ingredients) for the freezer. Then as I go to make plans, I can browse my virtual freezer and drop the frozen dinner rolls or baked ziti in on a busy day. I can even set a reminder the day before to pull them out to thaw.

I feel like the only thing Plan to Eat doesn’t do for me is chop my vegetables.

Let’s be friends & share recipes!

Plan to Eat is super easy to use, but you will need to add your own recipes. This initial setup will require more work than any other time. Yet it won’t be very hard; unless you exclusively use your own recipes that have no equivalent on the internet, you can google pretty much anything.

I want to make it really easy for you to start – I will share my recipes with you. You can share recipes with friends, and I’d love to have you as a friend. My username is Cindyzoo1 and once you set up a free trial account you can add me and have access to my 300 recipes.

Do you have any questions about Plan to Eat? Or do you have thoughts about meal planning in general? Let’s chat in the comments.

Disclaimer: I am a part of the Plan to Eat referral program; if you subscribe, Plan to Eat offers a small compensation to me at no cost to you. (Hint: You can do this when you join, too!)