9. Plan to Eat
Perhaps the most basic app at first glance, Plan to Eat has a few surprises for health-conscious meal planners.
First and foremost, by simply bookmarking the Plan to Eat webpage, you are able to scour the likes of Pinterest or Delish and simply click the recipes you like to automatically add them to your meal plan.
Additionally, the user interface is extremely intuitive, making it a cinch to drag and drop items to populate your meal planner for the week. This is also super helpful if one person is trying to eat gluten-free, while also planning regular meals for kids at the same time.
Speaking of kids – if you bookmark the site on their personal devices as well, they are able to log in and see what’s planned for dinner. Older kids may even be able to get the meal started with the recipe right in front of them.
Do I hear allowance money?
You can also add notes to the planner if leftovers are on the agenda, which cuts back on doubling the ingredients in the shopping list.
The Staples List is a great place to add common, and often forgotten, items to your shopping list. Just click to add the staple to your weekly shopping list, without having to re-enter it time and again.
Got questions? No worries. Plan to Eat has top-notch customer service agents willing and eager to help.
This app is ideal for people who already have a pretty decently sized recipe collection or even for those who love to look around on the internet for new recipes. This is because it does not come with a preset recipe database.
The Plan to Eat app is available online, as well as via Google Play and iTunes.
10. Big Oven
Yes, this meal planning app offers more than 350,000 recipes to inspire you! And, yes, it offers a snapshot feature where you can take pics of family recipes, and Big Oven will upload them into your recipe collection for you.
You can comment on recipes and receive notification of feedback, and then create a grocery list that can be shared by other members of the family. These are all awesome features, but cooking with leftovers and controlling your portions is this app’s bread and butter, so to speak.
With Big Oven, simply choose up to 3 leftovers/ingredients and the app will tell you what you can create! For instance:
London broil
Tomatoes
Mushrooms
I typed these in, and Big Oven suggested:
Chili
Slow Cooker Ropa Vieja
Irish stew
There were other suggestions, but these three recipes utilized all three ingredients I typed in. Other recipes were just using one or two of the ingredients as a springboard to something else.
Either way, pretty cool.