By planning meals ahead of time, you can eat healthier food and save time and money at the grocery store.
The challenge can seem daunting, though. Planning menus days in advance, grocery shopping in bulk and preparing multiple dinners in one day are no easy tasks at first. But by developing an organized system and routine, you’ll become a meal planning professional.
Mobile apps for your smartphone or tablet make it easier to manage recipes and prepare meals.
Pepperplate, a free meal planning app (screenshot on right), helps users plan meals based on imported recipes, build shopping lists with needed ingredients and share recipes and menus with friends. Users can select popular recipes online or manually import their families’ secret recipes to the app. Once the recipe collection has been saved, Pepperplate guides users when grocery shopping and preparing recipes.
Other apps like Cook Smarts, Ziplist, Plan to Eat and Paprika also provide grocery list and meal planning features, making meal prep a little bit easier.
SOURCE: lifehacker.com
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Slow cookers are the perfect electrical cooking appliance for families who are crunched for time but who want to make quality, healthy meals. More recipes than ever are designed to be prepared in advance, frozen and reheated. Enter to win your own slow cooker by emailing a recipe for an “On The Menu” category below to ec@electricconsumer.org by April 20.