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It's Sunday night: do you know what's for dinner for the rest of your life?

Jan 7 2007
  • mommy's blog
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By mommy

I don't care how cool and urban and hip a parent you are, facing the plain reality that you need to put dinner on the table for your family, one way or another, every night of the week until your kids go off to college could turn anyone into a slack-jawed, casserole-loving, Prairie Home Companion-listening, ketchup on the broccoli-allowing, Rachel Ray wanna-bee.

It's the conversation we hear the most around the proverbial water cooler, in the literal school yard, and it comes up everyday on the other-worldly message boards. It's unavoidable, inescapable, it's the dark secret we all harbor as we're out with our Bugaboos and Jimmy Choos looking above-it-all...at some point we have to go home and feed our children.

Anybody can cook a meal and we've all succumbed to take-out occasionally, but, every night for the rest of our kids' childhoods is a lot of tacos! So what's the answer? Well, sometimes being really cool and above it all means you are able to do something dorky and take it in stride. That's where I think menu planners fall. Menu planners are website services which will email you a week's worth of meals with grocery lists so that you can spend less time fretting over decisions like mac and cheese or beef stroganoff and more time, well, doing something better than that.

There are a bunch of sites out there. We excluded anything that suggested pigs in blankets, was so complicated it made menu planning into a life-style, or seemed to be written by a red-state-crockpot-loving-wacko on principle. These are our favorites:

SavingDinner started as a column on the truly scary FlyLady site. Leanne Ely is a nutritionist and sends weekly menus in several different categories including Regular, Vegetarian, Low Carb, Body Clutter (covers meals all day, not just dinner), and (ahem) Crock Cooker.

The Scramble is a stand out for it's more eclectic recipes and a chatty newsletter.

Our current favorite recipe site is allrecipes.com, so their menu mailer, called Cooknik, is an immediate favorite. It's a mix of traditional and more eclectic recipes, but it's backed by the resources of the site as opposed to the other mailers which are more homespun.

Lastly, Menus4Moms.com has the unique distinction of being free. So if you want to give menu mailers a try truly risk-free it might be a good place to start.

If menu planners seem too much like the gateway behavior to the dark side of parenting there's always FreshDirect. Besides bringing groceries right to your door and basically eliminating the chore of shopping and schlepping groceries, they've added one-click recipes and prepared meals. But that only gets you so far---we're talking EVERY NIGHT FOR THE...yeah I know, shut up.

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New food store for kids very well located

[...] Macmillan’s Online

Submitted by Mommy Poppins??”Get more out of living in NYC with kids &raq on February 25, 2007 - 3:52am.

[...] Macmillan's Online Dictionary has featured the phrase Fridge Googling, a term coined by the online parenting community, as its term of the week. Have you heard the term? Is it something your family does? Fridge Googling, it has also been known as Google Cooking, is to look for recipes online by searching for the ingredients you have in your fridge or pantry. It's a good way for busy parents to keep fresh food from wasting before it goes bad, find a meal from what you have at home, rather than getting take-out??”or maybe you just need a little everyday inspiration. (For more cooking inspiration check out our article on a xhref=”http://www.mommypoppins.com/?p=6″> menu planners.) Now that Google will plan out our menus, we just need those Google bots to come and cook for us. (via ParentHacks) [...]

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We're vegetarian and I would

Submitted by Angela on March 8, 2007 - 1:00pm.

We're vegetarian and I would love to know if any of these sites offer no-meat subscriptions!

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  • reply

I know that Saving Dinner

Submitted by mommy on March 8, 2007 - 1:06pm.

I know that Saving Dinner does a vegetarian menu.

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I LOVE my Saving Dinner

Submitted by Suzanne on March 8, 2007 - 3:17pm.

I LOVE my Saving Dinner subscription. We have the vegetarian mailer. It's worth its weight in gold as far as I'm concerned. For all of you curious if this will work for you- she has complete sample menus with recipes & shopping lists available for free for all her various mailers (http://www.savingdinner.com/menu_mailer/free_dinner_menu.html). It has really helped our food budget and expanded our tastes. I am a Saving Dinner Groupie!

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I do Saving Dinner, too, and

Submitted by Leigh on March 9, 2007 - 2:45am.

I do Saving Dinner, too, and I love it! I also get the Menus4Moms since they're free - but I use Saving Dinner every week. I was clueless about planning meals, and this has helped so much!

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I also do Saving Dinner. I

Submitted by Elizabeth on March 9, 2007 - 3:35am.

I also do Saving Dinner. I subscribe to the "Heart Healthy" menu, which follows the guidelines of the American Heart Association. I love it. The only problem (and this is minor) is that there is no salt in anything (with this particular menu), and my family doesn't require a salt-free diet. But I just add salt----no big deal. My favorite part about Saving Dinner are her side dish recommendations with each meal, along with the side dish ingredients on the shopping list. That way I remember to pick up fresh veggies, and I also remember to have variety. I used to plan great main dishes and then the side dish was a last minute microwaving of frozen corn. I don't do that as often any more, thank goodness. The menus are inexpensive too.

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We did Menumailer for about

Submitted by alianora on March 10, 2007 - 10:15pm.

We did Menumailer for about 6 months, and we liked it ok. It was rare that any one week had more than one meal we would be interested in making again, so we didnt bother to renew. We went with the regular menu for 2 - the regular has vegetarian options for each dinner. We never tried the vegetarian menu - Im not vegetarian, but my husband is!

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I'm a devout Scramble (Six

Submitted by FoodieRD on March 11, 2007 - 3:35pm.

I'm a devout Scramble (Six O'Clock Scramble) subscriber. The recipes are quick, delicious and healthy! Most of the recipes include less than 10 ingredients and take less than 30 minutes to make - perfect for a busy family. My kids are eating things we wouldn't have dreamed of before - tilapia with carribean pineapple sauce, black bean burgers, sweet potato burritos, Greek rice bowl with spinach, feta and pinenuts, honey dijon shrimp, baked chicken with apricot dijon sauce, and so many more! And, my meat-eating husband is loving the vegetarian meals (several featured each week) The eNewsletter includes 5 recipes and a complete grocery list so you only have to go shopping once a week. There's also a cookbook companion. I can't say enough about how easy and delicious the Scramble has made dinner in my house. Check it out at www.thescramble.com.

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[...] was one of our first

Submitted by Mommy Poppins??”Get more out of NYC for kids -- Activities, on January 18, 2008 - 3:05am.

[...] was one of our first posts and also one of the most popular. If you go to the original post you can see some great reader comments [...]

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Welcome to Mommy Poppins

MommyMommy Poppins is New York City's favorite free online resource for parents and kids where you'll discover the inside skinny on where and what to do, see, learn, play, make, read, splash, eat, run amok, party and envy in the New York area with kids. I hope you like the site. Feel free too email me if you have any questions.Anna


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