Looking for a meal planning app/site

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Jessie24330
Jessie24330 Posts: 224 Member
edited August 2018 in Food and Nutrition
I'm looking for a free/cheap app or site that I can add several weeks worth of meals and when those weeks are over, it will start at the beginning again, if that makes sense. I don't need to be able to do anything but enter the name of dish and a link to the site for things I use a recipe for.

I've tried doing this with Google Calendar but it's not working as easily as I'd hoped. Every time something changes, I have to go back and change every entry one at a time (as far as when/how often to repeat the meal), which got to be a huge pain quickly.

I have an android so iphone apps won't work for me (although if you know one, feel free to share in case it might help someone else).

Thank you so much.

ETA: I don't want/need anything that provides recipes, I want to be able to enter and use my own.

Replies

  • kommodevaran
    kommodevaran Posts: 17,890 Member
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    Maybe you could make a spreadsheet instead? I have used OpenOffice to plan meals since 2014.
  • livingleanlivingclean
    livingleanlivingclean Posts: 11,752 Member
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    You're on it?

    You can prelog as far advance as you like on mfp. Save your meals and just copy them in to the days you want.
  • Jessie24330
    Jessie24330 Posts: 224 Member
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    Kommodevaran, thank you, I'd not thought of Google Sheets. I could make a new page for each week. I think it should work well, and extra bonus that it syncs between the phone and computer.

    LivingLean, thanks for the idea but I'm not interested in using MFP in this way.
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
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    If you are excel savvy you could create a spreadsheet that would do this for you - I downloaded one a few years ago but lost it in the great laptop crash of 2013. One sheet had the names of all the meals, organized into groups (chicken, beef, takeout, pasta, etc) and then the front sheet was organized by day and had references to those cells in a drop down. So you would just click Monday, Dinner and you’d see the drop down to choose if you wanted chicken Parmesan or beef and broccoli or lasagna or whatever. It took some time for me to go in and put all my favorite meals in the second tab, and then I wasn’t super diligent about using it so after I lost the file I didn’t pursue it again.

    I imagine there are apps now that probably support this so I’m interested in what responses you get. I know some people use PepperPlate for something similar - I only used it for recipes and found that redundant when I started using Pinterest. I’ve joked that what I would like is for Pinterest to just randomly select meals that I’ve pinned and spit out a meal plan for me - since I have thousands of recipes pinned but always make the same couple of things, I rarely branch out.

  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
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    I know a friend who uses "Plan to Eat" and likes that she can drag and drop recipes directly to her meal calendar and automatically scale ingredients to the number of servings. It's a paid service, though, and I don't know much about it to vouch for it. I don't know if it would work for your specific purposes, but if you find the subscription fee reasonable, check out their free trial.

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