What is a good no-effort online weekly meal planner?

October 12, 2008 7:30 AM

I am looking for a meal planner online, or downloadable (preferably for Mac or iPhone) that will give me an aggregated shopping list and recipes for the week.

Hi folks. I am trying to get in the habit of cooking my own meals, so I can be more healthy and save money. My cooking repertoire is somewhat limited, but I can follow directions.

I am looking for a meal planner online, or downloadable (preferably for Mac or iPhone) that will give me an aggregated shopping list and recipes for the week. I saw one on Google a while ago that sort of accomplished that, but it was a subscription service and was not customizable at all. The more effort involved, the less likely I am to do this.

A book that accomplishes the same might also be helpful. However, I'm a big guy, and a book based around a 2000 calorie diet would probably be dangerous for me at first.

Thanks!

posted by cprompt to food & drink (4 answers total)

I am not sure if it does exactly what you are looking for, but the cookbook application MacGourmet has a meal planning add-on. You can generate shopping lists from the recipes you map to the meal plan. The program itself is, in my opinion, the best recipe database app available for the Mac, and the support is great-- whenever I've run into some sort of problem the developer has either told me what I am doing wrong or fixed it within a day or two.

Take a look at the website and see what you think. I've looked for similar apps before and this is as close I have come to what I want.
posted by synecdoche at 7:59 AM on October 12, 2008

Sparkpeople does exactly this. Create a profile, answer a few questions, and you'll get a weekly shopping list catered towards your needs.
posted by Brittanie at 3:58 PM on October 12, 2008

Just last week I was searching for something very similar, and found Yum for the Mac. I like it so far as it's free and fairly easy to add recipes you find online, tell it what ingredients you already have and then generate a shopping list from your specified recipes that you can port to your iPod. It also comes with about a hundred preloaded recipes, and while I haven't used it for weekly meal planning, I think you could easily do this by making categories for each day of the week.
posted by KatlaDragon at 5:05 PM on October 12, 2008

Sparkpeople looks like exactly what I was looking for, so I'll give it a try!

Those two programs look really good too -- especially how they both do shopping lists.

Thanks for the suggestions!
posted by cprompt at 4:02 PM on October 13, 2008