When I decided to try my hand at meal planning, a friend suggested Plan To Eat.

I’d honestly never heard of them, since meal planning was something that I figured just wouldn’t work for us. With five kids, RSD that knocks me sideways and into bed without warning, how could I possibly meal plan? I’ve tried it before, and found it incredibly time-consuming and frustrating. With a family my size, my ability to have any uninterrupted time to focus on anything is few and far between.

But, I knew that this was something I needed to do, for my budget, and also to get my home running smoother. I also knew darn well that going it alone wasn’t going to work for me in the slightest. So, I checked out the program.

Honestly, I was impressed. It’s incredibly simple to use, and heaven knows I *need* simple in my life. They even have video tutorials available.

Basically, how it works is that you go through your favourite recipes online, or you can input them into the recipes on the site. You can get a handy-dandy toolbar doodad (don’t you just love my technical terms? I swear, I have all the tech know how of a bowl of paste!) Schedule your meals, and it will create a grocery list from the ingredients. You can edit your list as need be, even separating the list into different grocery stores.

This was a huge help to us, since Wolf is doing our grocery shopping more these days. The list even gets separated into different sections of the grocery store, which meant Wolf actually got pretty much everything on the list. (I don’t know how he manages to still miss *something* but the missing items were far less than normal, so that’s definite win).

There’s also a way to ‘friend’ people who are also a part of the Plan To Eat membership, and share recipes with them, or you can mark recipes as ‘private’, so your super secret eight generation spaghetti sauce doesn’t become available to anyone but yourself, and still have the ingredients imported to the grocery list.

Everyone gets a free one month membership to try it out, and after that, it’s $39 a year. Honestly, I think it’s worth the money, because I figure I’ll save far more than that over the course of a year, by ensuring that all the groceries I need are in the house, and having a plan, rather than doing the last-minute scramble at supper time. I scheduled for an entire month, omitting fresh produce beyond when it would last, and then created new grocery lists as I needed them. I loved not having to constantly rifle through and figure out what to do on any given day. Open it up, and there it was. (I did goof and forget to create a list and send Wolf grocery shopping on the day I needed him to go, so had to shuffle meals around until we bought more onions, etc)

Only downside that I can see is that there isn’t a way to input what’s in your pantry, as in a digital pantry, but honestly, since I don’t put in breakfasts and lunch on the schedule, it would end up being completely inaccurate anyways.

Short of winning the lotto, and hiring someone else to do the meal planning, shopping, and cooking for me, Plan to Eat is the best tool I’ve found to get things under some sort of organizational control.

Plan To Eat has generously offered a one year subscription to be offered as a give away on this blog! Enter below for your chance to win!

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Good luck!

PS: I’m so pleased with this program, that I’m going to put up an affiliate link. You can sign up for your free 30 day trial here, and see if Plan To Eat works as well for you as it has for me!