What, exactly, is a digital Meal Planning Board?
Put simply, the Meal Planning Board is an app accessible from any modern device using a modern browser. The web-based program doesn’t care what operating system, device, or even very much what browser you’re using. If you have an internet connection and can type “www.insertmealhere.com” into your web browser, you can probably use it.
But WHAT does it DO for me!?
Have you ever:
- Forgotten a recipe?
- Lost a favorite recipe?
- Forgotten why you bought a vegetable or other ingredient?
- Wanted to find a recipe that you know has a specific ingredient, but the recipe you’ve found isn’t the right one?
- Forgotten ingredient(s) at the grocery store?
- Bought too much or too little of any given ingredient?
The {IMH} Digital Meal Planning Board solves all of these problems and more for you. The Recipe Collection stores all of your recipes in one digital space – think of it like your mom’s or grandma’s recipe box on the kitchen counter. The Schedule helps you plan out your daily or weekly meals as detailed or as simply as you like. The app even builds a shopping list based on your meal plan.
The Recipe Collection
Recipes from your collection appear on cards in your collection. Manage your recipes with tags, source notes, and authors specific to the recipe.
The recipe input screen. Add all your favorite recipes. Keep them organized with source information so.
Growing up, my grandparents and even my mom had recipe cards they kept in a little box on the kitchen counter with their favorite recipes. Some recipes came from cookbooks and others were family recipes passed on from generation to generation. My mom and grandparents would thumb through the recipes and make a selection prior to cooking. As I got older, some of these cards were copied with love and care and placed in a set of my own cards and given to me.
The Schedule
A sample schedule. Make it as detailed or as complicated as what works for you. When plans change, drag recipes from one day to another to keep track of those changes.
Use The schedule to build a meal plan for a week, a day, a month, or whatever time frame you like best. You can see how leftovers might be used – in this sample plan, the roast beef at the beginning of the week becomes French dip and then tacos later in the week, for example.
The Shopping List
A view of the shopping list. Any item can become a repeating item by clicking on the circular arrows. Items already in your pantry can be deleted.
Stop forgetting crucial ingredients with the Shopping List. The Digital Meal Planning Board builds this for you. Build a new list for a day, a week, or any length of time that makes sense to you.
The shopping list pulls from your plan to build the list of things you need and want to buy. It’s based on your recipes. If you need 8 chicken breasts for the week to use in three different recipes, it will put eight chicken breasts on the list. Salt shows up on the list every time (salt is, in fact, in all of our recipes). And, as we don’t need salt every week, we can delete it from the list.
Manage the shopping list by adding items, store sections, putting items into store sections, viewing repeating items, and creating a new list, for those times when you do forget the salt.
The list also sorts itself based on your preferences. Sections are fully customizeble to you, the user, and how you shop at your store. You can even add repeating items to your list so they show up every week. We always buy eggs and cream. We usually also buy milk, yoghurt, and bacon. These are on our list automatically, every week, regardless of our meal plan. We also add other, non-food items to the list: shampoo, soap, and parchment paper for example. Hard to forget items that are staring you in the face on a list.
Biographies
The {Insert Meal Here} team is a family of five meal planners, recipe developers, and taste testers and two cats based in rainy Portland, Oregon.
Sam Justice is the creator and developer of the Digital Meal Planning Board. He started developing the initial code for the project when he couldn’t find a digital meal planner that met his needs. Sam meal plans in part because his wife tells him to, but primarily so he can keep run a tight ship at home. Having a clear and concise plan as well as quick and easy access to every recipe for the week is crucial to keeping the youngest in the family fed and busy. The first recipe that was used to test the program was his signature Almond & Hazelnut Crusted Chicken. During Alpha testing, the recipe went in to the system at least a dozen times and now rests comfortably as a Public Recipe available to everyone using the Digital Meal Planning Board. When he’s not working on new features or chasing after his children, he can be found playing a board game or making triangles for the Enlightened on Ingress.
Megan Justice runs operations and writes most of the recipes in the Public Recipe Collection. She spends her day away from home putting numbers in columns and filling out tax returns while chasing after her CPA license. Megan loves most all whole, unprocessed foods and is quite proud of her Grape Walnut Salad. She started meal planning at just 19, when she cleared up debilitating migraines and a few other health issues by eating food. She’s a huge proponent and early adopter of the traditional foods movement, and started fermenting her own food over a decade ago. When Megan manages to steal a few minutes away from her obligations, she can be found knitting or writing.
Bran is the dragonmaster of the house. A true free spirit, he spends his days reciting facts and figures and finding recipes both in cookbooks and online. He has his very own board on our Pinterest account called Bran’s Picks that is full of the magic and whimsy of a small child. A budding cook himself, Bran has written a few recipes, including butter puree. His favorite meal right now is Quinoa Meatballs, though he’s also a sucker for all things spinach, kale, and parsnip.
Liam is young and excited by just about everything, especially food. From simple foods like apples and cheese to complex dishes including Strata and tacos, this little guy can’t get enough of the eating adventure. Among is favorites are Oatmeal, beef, any anything chocolate. When he’s not eating, he enjoys upside down time, books, and conversations with his best friend, the vacuum.
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