The Easiest Way to Plan Meals
A few months ago, N and I attempted meal planning.
Once the novelty of spending 2 hours on a Sunday finding recipes and writing each ingredient down one by one had worn off, we gave up. Literally we tried it for a week and never again, because it bored our socks off.
I was disheartened by this. I know for a fact (thanks to a million and one ‘Organised Mom Blogs‘ on the internet) that meal planning is an excellent way to control your spending and save money, because it creates less waste. So for the last few months I have probably spent more on food than I would have had we stuck it out with meal planning, purely because I’m too lazy to do all that stuff every week.
Enter Yummly.
Y’know once in a while you find a really great app, and you just wanna give those developers a hug/pat on the back/tip of your hat? You just want to say “Hey, you really thought this s**t through. Well done.”
Well, this is one of those apps.
Setting it up was super easy – I just signed up with my Google deets and it started asking me some questions about myself. As I was answering them, I could tell this was gonna be one smart tool…
Yummly then gives you a list of recipes that are recommended for you. To save a recipe you like the look of, hit ‘Yum‘ and it saves it to your ‘Recipe Box‘ (which you can access from the top bar or in your dropdown in the top right). You also get the opportunity to save it to a specific collection (more on this in a mo!).
Once you start ‘Yum‘-ing things, your recommended list gets more and more tailored to your preferences. I also found it was good to go into your ‘Taste Preferences‘ in your settings (where you can edit all your details you filled in at the start) and add things you don’t like to the ‘Disliked Ingredients‘ bit.
You can search recipes from the home page, or browse things seasonally etc. which is pretty cool. When you click on a recipe (before it takes you to the original website), you see a summary of the recipe within Yummly. This includes the ingredients, reviews/comments by others, as well as nutritional values. How cool is that?!
So hold up! How exactly does this help with meal planning any more than Pinterest does?
Patience my friends, patience.
My advice is to create a ‘Collection‘ named ‘Week‘, and start adding recipes you want to cook within the week. If you add loads, you can always go back and prune this down to your 7 dinners or 14 lunches and dinners etc.
Once you’ve saved some recipes you wanna make for the week, whip your phone or tablet out and download the Yummly app.
Once you’re signed in, you’ll see some ‘trending recipes‘ or something, but ignore that and press the green menu button. Here, you’ll see you have a shopping list, but if you click on it, you’ll see that it’s empty.
So, go to ‘My Yums‘ on your app, and find the recipe you want to buy stuff for and press then green ‘+’ button.
Voila! Yummly has added the ingredients from that recipe to your shopping list! When you go and check out your list, you can select on items and edit the quantities, review the recipe, or delete the ingredient.
You can also add any ingredient you want to this list manually, by using the search bar. I love how it puts ingredients into categories for you, making it easier when you’re wandering around the supermarket.
I’m definitely glad I’ve found this tool, and can’t wait to start cooking all the recipes I’ve found! Another great thing about Yummly is you can search by ‘publisher’, meaning you can find your favourite food bloggers (as long as they’re on Yummly) and save their recipes to your Recipe Box.
If you’re a food blogger, you can sign up as a ‘publisher’ and add your own recipes to Yummly too!
Let me know if you’ll be trying this or if you have a better way (I bet you don’t)!
Please note I haven’t been asked to write this by anyone…I just thought it was awesome so I had to share!
That looks briliant! Unfortunately I’m always on night shifts and François as well so basically we eat what we can, not really healthy… I hope I can use this anyway, I’ll definitely have a look!
x
Céline from Larry & Co.
Yummly has a great section called ‘Quick meals’ or something like that, where all the recipes take 10 minutes or less, so you should definitely check that out! x
Is there a way to add recipes to a certain day of the week, in places like breakfast, lunch, dinner? I use spoonacular for meal planning because I rarely cook breakfast and I can put stuff like Greek yogurt on their meal planner. https://spoonacular.com/meal-planner if anyone is interested :)
Ah that’s interesting – I’ll definitely take a look! I used to use an app that had that ability, but I gave that up. What I like about Yummly is that I’m able to find recipes and add the ingredients in the same app, rather than pottering about on Pinterest and adding the ingredients manually to another place. x
Totally get what you mean — it’s rare to come across something that actually feels like it gets you. I’ve been juggling a bunch of collaboration tools lately, most of them just… meh. Then I stumbled onto https://perspectiveteam.com , and man, it felt like someone finally understood how teams actually work. No fluff, just super clean and useful. It’s not flashy, but everything about it screams “we built this with real people in mind.” That moment when you’re like, “Okay, someone thought this through” — yeah, that was it for me.
I didn’t have any expectations concerning that title, but the more I was astonished. The author did a great job. I spent a few minutes reading and checking the facts. Everything is very clear and understandable. I like posts that fill in your knowledge gaps. This one is of the sort.