Like you, one of my most time-consuming weekly chores is making my menu for the week and then preparing my shopping list before heading out to the store. For the last three months, I’ve been using the menu-planning service, Relish! to make this task easier.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: the lovely women at Relish offered me a free 3-month trial of the service so that I could blog about it. But, they agreed to my sitewide policy: that I’d blog honestly, and will in no way skew my thoughts because of this free membership.)
How Relish! works:
First, you purchase a membership. They have several different pricing options.
Then, each week you choose from a new list of recipes. You can select meals from several categories, including kid-friendly, quick, simple, slow-cooker and vegetarian options. You can also keep track of your favorite recipes from Relish! and add them into your weekly menu any time.
Sample Menu
Once you’ve made your choices, their List-Making Function automatically generates a list of all the things you’ll need for the menu you’ve chosen.
Sample Grocery List
My thoughts on my experience:
Pros:
- There are lots of choices for the meals. I never was at a loss to choose 5 – 6 meals that my family would enjoy.
- The menus include side dishes, which I find really helpful. I hate trying to come up with the right side to each meal. Makes my teeth itch.
- Their recipes make it easy to incorporate lots of fresh fruits and veggies into each meal.
- The recipes are super family friendly – my kids liked everything I made, and so did my semi-picky husband.
- The automatic list-making function shaved a ton of time off of the making of my weekly shopping list.
- Many of the recipes were really delicious and none were huge failures. That’s more than I can say for most recipe books I own. In fact, there’s one recipe for breakfast for dinner that has changed the way I make scrambled eggs forever.
Cons:
- You have to choose the number of people you’re cooking for for the entire week. You can’t specify meals for 5, you have to choose 4 or 6 people. For me, that’s hard because I don’t always have 4 people at every meal. I wish you could choose the number of servings per meal, rather than overall for the entire week.
- A couple of times, the list the system created for me included items that I didn’t need for the recipes I’d chosen. It was a weird glitch, but happened only twice.
Is it worth the (roughly) $7/month price? For me, the answer was yes.
Of course there are lots and lots of resources on the internet that enable you to plan your meals for free. But Relish! made my planning much faster and easier than me doing it on my own. That’s worth a lot to me. And I liked opening up the site and wondering what recipes I’d be choosing and making for that week. My menu planning became kind of surprising and fun, rather than a chore.
Hey, that’s always worth the price, right?
If you want to give Relish! a try, they are offering readers of this site a 2-week trial membership. Just go to this link and enter the code “Penelope” in the “voucher #” box and you’re in!
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Those always sound interesting, but my husband and I have worked out a system (slowly, over years) that works for us, and really the only difference from Relish! is that I spend time copying a few ingredients to my ‘take it with me’ list, which I’m always writing on anyhow, so it isn’t a big deal.
We keep a pile of index cards with the names, recipe locations (e.g., America’s Test Kitchen, p293), and to-buy ingredients right on the card. We store it in a fridge holder that I think is meant for post-it notes. Then we have a manilla folder cut in half with pockets for the index cards, 3 per side. We keep an open night for leftovers/breakfast for dinner/pizza/impromptu bbq, because we found we rarely got through all of them when we scheduled 7 dinners.
We make the menu the night before I go shopping, and just pick our 6 cards out and check over the ingredients right on the cards, then add them to the list if we need them. I’m able to keep pantry stuff on hand, so for many dishes, the only items listed are fresh meat and produce, or something unusual (like adobo chilies).
The next upgrades to the system include rewriting the index cards on different colored cards to distinguish which protein (e.g., all blue cards for fish, all red cards for beef, etc). We tried little stickers on the edges but they didn’t stay on well. Also, I’d like to find a folder that has a pretty pattern instead of just a plain manilla one.
Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to share b/c I feel like my system is a pretty Penelope way of doing things!
I LOVE your system, Cecily. It’s totally, 100% Penelope. I appreciate your taking the time to spell it out. Good for you guys!
There are LOTS of ways to do this sort of menu planning and Relish! is great, but only one of them.
The Relish site is convenient, but most of the recipes (even the low calorie ones) that I looked at had at or above the amount of fat grams than I’d want in a day! Not too healthy…
We’ve got a meal system pretty similar to what Cecily and her husband use. We have quite a few cookbooks and some favorite recipes that we put on index cards with the page number and name of the cookbook then keep them in a big jar. Since we’re both so indecisive we each pick out 4 on the weekend before our grocery store trip and of the 4 we pick we each get one toss back. So we end up with 6 meals total and one open night for leftovers, etc.
Relish would be interesting to try – but is there a place that you can add your favorite recipes to the list and input their ingredients to make one full list? Two lists wouldn’t be too bad I guess, one from Relish and one from our favorites but almost doesn’t seem like it would be worth the extra work.
I’ve used Relish for about a year now – not always faithfully each week, but I do really like it. Every so often a recipe won’t be tops with my family, but we’ve never had any huge failures. There are always recipes marked “kid-friendly” which helps too. I definitely have less wasted food using the shopping list it creates.
They have recently done a complete site overhaul, and one of the things they added was the ability to import your own recipes. I haven’t tried it yet, but you put in your recipe, and their staff will “convert” it to their format, so it can be added to shopping lists. I’ll definitely have to try it sometime. Usually I just write the extra stuff I need onto the Relish shopping list for anything I’m going to make from my own recipes, as well as extra items we just need for the week.
One thing I don’t think you mentioned was the monthly freezer meals. The options change every month, and it will print out your shopping list, directions to make the meal pre-freezer, and instructions to tape onto your frozen entree for what to do to reheat/finish cooking it. It’s another great feature that gives you some extra meals to fix in a hurry over the month.
Thanks this sounds interesting. Right now I subscribe to e-Mealz wthich is the same as this one with ONE BIG exception. You can’t customize your meals. I’ll give the trial a try and see if it’s time to make a switch.
@Carrie: another great menu planning process. Thanks for adding that.
@Erin: thanks for the head’s up on these new features. I hadn’t seen that you can now import your own recipes into Relish. That makes it even easier!
You can do this for free on the website Epicurious – they have weekly meal planners with print-out recipe lists.
let me start by saying…UGH, I HATE menu planning. It’s one of my most hated tasks…I’m just awful at it. I want to eat healthier and I have the info but putting that into meals is beyond me
this site sounds perfect then. I’ll have to check it out and see if it’ll work for me!
I tried Relish and I feel the need to warn that if you are vegetarian, the options are very limited. It got so bad I had to cancel my subscription. For this reason, I much prefer the six o’clock scramble which I highly recommend.
sounds great . . . although i love menu planning, love my cookbooks, and actually enjoy putting together my weekly list
i use a simple weekly menu planning pad (love this one!) and a simple rhodia pad for list . . .gets the job done!
because i’m a novice to cooking and meal planning, my current system includes a trip to TJ’s once a week where we buy the same exact items (week after week:). The beau is just now starting to wince at our predictable dinners (i, on the other hand, could eat the same thing every night)!
Neat site review, Mer!!! I may have to give the trial a whirl. I LOVE the idea of it making a list for me.
Thanks for the visit today!
One of the items that has been languishing on my habit list is to figure out food. I want to meal plan for so many reasons – health, money, the sadness and odor of veggies rotting in my fridge… I need to find a system that works for me. Or I could just move to an awesome foodie city and eat out
Thanks for doing this review. I’m going to give it a try.
Like to visit this post because I get something new from here.
Very interesting info, i am waiting for more ! Keep updating your blog and you will have a lot o readers
I am so excited to have uncovered this little nugget from your archives…i have been accused of being ocd when it comes to menu planning/shopping list organization. i get it honestly from my mother who only went to the grocery store once, yes i said once, a month. she made a monthly menu and shopping list and stuck to it! i inherited this “disease”… laughing…but on a weekly level. i have tried to incorporate the one new meal a week into our family dinners, but haven’t been very faithful to that….
i am going to do this trial and see how it goes and if it cuts down on the frustration of creating meals and shopping lists in one failing swope! i will let you know how it goes…thanks again for sharing this great idea!
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I am so excited to have uncovered this little nugget from your archives…i have been accused of being ocd when it comes to menu planning/shopping list organization. i get it honestly from my mother who only went to the grocery store once, yes i said once, a month. she made a monthly menu and shopping list and stuck to it! i inherited this “disease”… laughing…but on a weekly level. i have tried to incorporate the one new meal a week into our family dinners, but haven’t been very faithful to that….
i am going to do this trial and see how it goes and if it cuts down on the frustration of creating meals and shopping lists in one failing swope! i will let you know how it goes…thanks again for sharing this great idea!
h
By far the most concise and up to date information I found on this topic.
Omg. I had not considered this that way before. I’m book-marking this to read your other stuff later. I have a few other web pages to take a look at and discovered this while searching for some info for work.