Meal Planning Update

Hello everyone.  Yes, I'm still alive.  I've actually been working on a post I thought I would have had done months ago, but am finding it a difficult one to write.  Part of the issue is how up in the air any potential plans are right now.  In the meantime, I thought I would write about some things that I used while on the boat and still use on land.

One of these that gets regular usage is meal planning.  Unfortunately the meal planning tool I had been using has decided to make the planning portion of the online tool a pay service.  While I am fine with adding recipes I've created and contribute reviews and ratings as well as endure advertisements, I (like many cruisers) just don't have the money to pay for annual subscriptions for such things.  So, I've been looking for alternatives.

A recipe I created and manually entered into Pepperplate.

Thus far, my favorite is a service called Pepperplate. The meal planning portion of the service is similar to BigOven and the grocery list generation is actually a little better about grouping similar items together so it makes the grocery store trip a bit easier. Recipe access is better as it doesn't link to other sources for the contents or instructions but imports them into the application.  By doing this, it also allows for offline access on tablets and other devices where you have downloaded their app.

The one thing Pepperplate doesn't have is an integrated database of public recipes.  Instead, it utilizes other recipe sites and can automatically import from many sites (AllRecipes, Better Homes and Gardens, Chow, Food Network, Recipes.com, and Simply Recipes just to name a few). It has a browser bookmark applet that makes recipe import simple.  On sites where it doesn't automatically import, pulling in a recipe is a simple matter of a few cut-and pastes using the same browser applet.  This is all similar to how BigOven worked and so far I've found Pepperplate a bit easier to use.

If you are looking for an option to aid in meal planning and provisioning, you might want to give Pepperplate a try.