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The holiday season is almost here, and with it come more “we’ll just grab something on the way home” dinners. Do your future self a favor and plan a few easy meals for the regular nights in the weeks ahead. Double batches help too, so you’re not cooking every night in a season that’s already all about cooking.
New Podcast Episodes
#142: Meal Planning for People Who…
This week, we cover three scenarios where we hear meal planning hesitation: people who hate cooking, people who cook for one, and people managing food allergies or dietary restrictions. For each one, we dig into what actually makes it hard and share practical ways meal planning can make it a whole lot easier instead of adding to the stress. We also cover some kitchen confessions on how we shortcut recipes and share your feedback on those confessions too! Enjoy!
#143: Has Social Media Romanticized Cooking?
This week we’re talking about the way social media has romanticized cooking and maybe made it more stressful. We love finding recipes online, and we’re not here to throw recipe creators under the bus. But there’s a gap between a 30-second reel of a perfectly plated meal and what happens in the kitchen on a Tuesday night.
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Recent Blog Posts
Japanese-Inspired Soba Noodle Soup
Get Linda’s take on a Japanese Soba Noodle Soup after she tried to recreate the real thing from a recent trip to Japan.
Recipes Everywhere? How to Organize Them in One Place
Here’s how to pull everything into one recipe collection you’ll actually cook from, whether your recipes live online or on paper.
Sourdough Pretzel Bites
If you are looking for a fun snack to bring to the next watch party for the game, I’ve got you covered! These sourdough pretzel bites are so good and so fun.
Introducing the Redesigned Plan to Eat App
The new version of the app is more than just an updated look and feel. We’ve intentionally enhanced and added features we know will make meal planning easier for you!
New on YouTube
Follow us on YouTube to get quick meal-planning tips and program tutorials!
Extras
You Asked, We Listened: A New Ingredient Layout in Plan to Eat
When we launched V4 of the Plan to Eat app, one change got more feedback than anything else: how ingredients look on your recipes. We sent a short survey with six ingredient layouts and asked which one you’d want as the default. Two options stood out:
- 35.2% chose a layout with the amount on the left, but right-aligned next to the ingredient name
- 41.6% chose a layout with the amount on the left, set in a soft highlighted tag
Instead of picking one winner, we combined the two favorites into a new layout:
The new layout is live in version 4.1.1 of the app. Update Plan to Eat, open any recipe, and you’ll see it in the Ingredients section. Learn more about the ingredients change in our recent blog post.
October’s most popular recipe imports:
- Brown Butter & Maple Chewy Pumpkin Cookies from Butternut Bakery
- Pastina Soup from Pinch of Yum
- Slow-Cooker Chili from NYT Cooking
- Maple Dijon Sheet Pan Chicken from Skinnytaste
- Chicken with Coconut Kale from Pinch of Yum
Program Updates
The development team is working hard to make updates, squash bugs, and add new features to both the desktop and mobile app versions of Plan to Eat!
App:
This month, we released app versions 4.1.0 – 4.1.1
- Cooking timers! Set up to 5 timers while you cook.
- Fixed Cook, Plan, and Shop sometimes opening at partial width on iPad.
- Your screen stays awake on recipes, and you can now turn that off in Recipe settings.
- Importing Recipes from a photo is faster.
- View per-ingredient nutrition breakdowns
- Scale recipes to decimal servings like 2.5
- Cooking view highlights ingredients more reliably; timers show total time and clearer controls
- Ingredient layout updated based on your survey feedback
- Non-recipe website links stay in your browser instead of opening the app
- Bug Fixes: Plan as Leftover from a menu, Print Recipe, Android nav bar overlap, shared recipe links
Desktop:
- Your nutrition numbers stay yours. If you enter your own calories or other nutrition values, they stay when you change ingredients or servings.
- Faster nutrition calculation, especially for recipes with ingredients we haven’t seen before.
- Smarter ingredient imports. Ingredients like “1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons flour” now come in correctly.
- Moving your recipes over from another app is simpler. The redesigned import page walks you through it step by step, now supports Paprika, Mela, Crouton, and Mealime, and shows which recipes are new, which you already have, and which couldn’t be read before anything is added.
- More ways to sort your recipes: reverse any sort with the arrow next to “Sort by”, or try the new Last Planned, Shuffle, and Last Updated sorts. Times Planned and Rating now sort your whole recipe book, and leftovers nights no longer count as another time a recipe was planned.
- Recipe filters are more accurate: the dairy, gluten, and meat shortcuts catch the right recipes, ingredients written with a hyphen like “whole-wheat” are found.
Highlighted Reviews
“I’ve been using this for a few years and love it. The new design? Gorgeous with some fantastic new features. The timer? Excellent! I use this daily when I cook dinner, and I’m not sure what I’d do without it, honestly!”
“This is hands down the best recipe app I’ve ever used and 100% worth paying for. It has been such a game changer in my meal prep. I don’t think I’ll ever be without it.”
