In our family I do the food shopping and I usually do it online. Every week I find myself planning similar meals like spaghetti bolognese, chilli, a meal with chips, fajitas, a Sunday Roast of some description and maybe even a pudding to follow the roast! In the old days I would look up the recipes and make a list of ingredients for each meal but I figured there must be a better way. So, I developed a meal planner database that allowed me to choose my meals and it would automatically select the ingredients and quantities according to how many people were likely to be around to eat it (with teenagers it is a bit of a guessing game).
Meal planning and online shopping became a lot easier because I just had to choose the meals and put the ingredients in the basket. The trouble was that because it was a desktop database it was limited and I really wanted it to be online so my children could use it to cook familar meals now they are growing up. So, I decided to recreate the meal planner database as a website. This is it, although it is somewhat more sophisticated than the original database. It contains cost information and calory information, as well as pictures of the meals and recipes. You can use our meals or create your own. You can set filters or limit the meals available to choose from by changing the settings.
At heart though it's just a family meal planner. I still use it every week and it makes my life easier. I hope you find it useful too. Please get in touch and let me know what you think. You can write to me at jamesmidgley@meal-planner.co.uk.
