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In the US, May brings so many reasons to gather around the table and share a meal. From Mother’s Day to graduations, last days of school, and Memorial Day, the calendar fills up quickly. We hope this month gives you plenty of reasons to celebrate and spend a little extra time with the people you cherish. And hopefully, your meal plans make those moments feel even easier!
New Podcast Episodes
#130: The Truth About Why Dinner Feels Exhausting
This week, we’re talking about why meal planning can feel more exhausting than other household chores. Tasks like vacuuming or folding laundry can usually wait, but feeding yourself or your family happens every single day, multiple times a day! We explore the invisible work behind feeding a household, why thinking about food can feel so relentless, and how the emotional and mental weight of meal planning makes it different from other chores.
#131: A Flexible Family Meal Planning System with Hannah Van Ark
Hannah Van Ark joins the show again to talk about family meal planning and creating systems that make feeding your family easier. After becoming a mom, Hannah realized that most families don’t need more nutrition knowledge; they need practical systems that reduce stress and get balanced meals on the table.
#132: Stop Avoiding Your Meal Plan: Simple Ways to Get Started
From busy schedules and mental load to perfectionism, habits, and not knowing where to start, we break down the real reasons meal planning gets pushed off. We also share practical ways to get unstuck, including starting small, lowering expectations, using templates, and building a system that actually works for your life.
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Recent Blog Posts
What is a Meal Rotation?
Meal planning doesn’t have to mean you’re starting from scratch every week. One of the best ways to make meal planning simpler is to stop reinventing the wheel entirely with a meal rotation.
Stop Overspending: Real-Life Tips to Save Money on Groceries
Here are some practical, foundational ways to save money at the grocery store while still putting nourishing meals on the table.
3 Ways to Make Natural Pink Food Coloring
You can make natural food colors at home. Here are three ways to make a pretty, natural pink color you can use in frosting for cakes, cupcakes, and cookies!
Why You Should Plan Fewer Meals Each Week
To have a successful meal plan, you don’t need to plan every meal of every day, and you might find a simpler approach more effective. If you’re constantly wasting food or not sticking to your weekly plan, we suggest starting smaller.
New on YouTube
Follow us on YouTube to get quick meal-planning tips and program tutorials!
Extras
Meal Planning Summit: We’re hosting our very first Meal Planning Summit on May 29! This free, one-day virtual event will bring together experts in meal planning, grocery shopping, meal prep, picky eating, and cooking basics to help you set up simple systems before summer begins. We’ll be sharing more details and opening registration soon, so keep an eye on your inbox.
#LifeSkillsNow Season 5: The Life Skills course from Katie Kimball’s team is back this summer with courses on cooking skills for teens, gardening, personal finance, chores, and even leadership! This is a free, fun, and educational way for your kids to spend a few days this summer, and registration is live!
April’s most popular recipe imports:
- Garlic Butter Crispy Chicken on Creamy Beans from Pinch of Yum
- Creamy Cottage Cheese Basil Pasta from NYT Cooking
- Yellow Curry Meatballs with Peanut Shallot Crispies from Pinch of Yum
- Sheet Pan Mediterranean Meatball Bowls from SkinnyTaste
- One Pan Garlic Parmesan Chicken Dinner from AllRecipes
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:
We released app version 3.7.7:
- You can now choose which day of the week your planner starts on from Planner Settings.
- We improved shopping list organization so similar items are grouped together more consistently.
- We improved iPad multitasking support so you can now use the app in a split view or slide-over window.
Desktop:
- The recipe search now ranks recipes with the keyword in their title above recipes that only mention it in the description, ingredients, or directions — so searching “chicken parmesan” surfaces a recipe titled “Chicken Parmesan” before a “Weeknight Bowl” that happens to mention chicken parmesan in its directions.
- The recipe search now matches partial words in titles. Typing “Apple Muff” finds “Apple Muffins” without having to type the full word.
- Your shopping list just got smarter! Similar ingredients are now automatically grouped together — so all your cheeses, pastas, breads, and more appear in one place instead of scattered throughout the list.
- Within each group, you can expand or collapse varieties to see exactly what you need. For example, all your Parmesan items collapse into a single row showing the total quantity across recipes.
- New “Expand All” toggle lets you expand or collapse all grouped items at once. Your preference is remembered across sessions.
- You can now drag an entire ingredient group to move all its items to a different store at once.
- Shopping list items are now more accurately assigned to the correct grocery category, even if you’ve customized your category names or added emojis.
- We improved recipe clipping for paywalled and login-protected sites — if our server can’t access the page, the clipper extension’s copy of the page is now used as a fallback.
Highlighted Reviews
“I love this app. I have been using it for several years. It is very easy to use and easy upload recipes. I plan my meals a week at a time than run my grocery list.”
“I love that I can collect recipes from any website and have them all in one convenient location. Plan meals ahead and the ingredients for those recipes got to my grocery list! Makes life so much easier.”
