The Menu Planner is a very simple add-on to our website that makes a world of difference. It helps everybody with organising meals in advance. This helps to prevent food being wasted meaning you save money but also actually provides a shopping list.

As you will see, it is pretty self explanatory but will run through everything just in case.

The top box “Add Recipe” is broken down into four categories for ease of searching:-

Alphabetical – Sorts all recipes alphabetically regardless of other categories

Course – Sorts all recipes by course i.e. brunch, breakfast, dinner, snacks etc.

Cuisine – Sorts into cuisine i.e. French, American, Greek, Italian etc.

Difficulty – Sort Into how difficult the recipe is to prepare and cook i.e. easy, hard, even I can do it etc.

For the example, we will use the alphabetical option.

When you click on the dropdown arrow, a list of recipe library is shown. This process can be sped up by typing in the first few letters of a recipe name. It will automatically search for every recipe with those letters in it. We have used Turk in this example and it brings a list of all recipe as shown below:

You can use the slide bar on the left to go down to the item you were looking for. Alternatively use the wheel on your mouse. Once you find the recipe click on it and it will load the recipe image for you.

NOTE: If you have chosen a recipe that you can produce from either leftovers or entirely from what you have in the fridge and larder, this will include the recipe in your planner but exclude it from your shopping list.

Lets say you want to have this for dinner on Sunday. You can simply click and drag the recipe over to the Sunday Dinner slot on your screen and unclick it. It will then stay in the spot. See below:-

You can of course select as many items as you wish for each day and can actually add additional courses if you wish. If you were having a party, you may wish to add “Appetisers” onto the Planner. A complete day would appear as follows:-

Don’t worry, we are nearly there and it is a lot quicker once you have done a few. When you are happy with your plan, you can print it off to put on the fridge door (that’s what I do so everybody knows in advance).  You can also “Generate a Shopping List” for the recipes you have just selected to print out and take with you to the shops. As you can see, there is a date range you can set and whether you want the ingredient measurements to be in Metric or Imperial. When you are happy just click on the tick. The following will appear for our selections:-

As you can see, you can save your shopping list for another day or print it off. To save you money, if you already have an ingredient in your home, you can cross the item off by ticking the little box next to the ingredient.

There we go all done. It really is easy to use and you will be able to produce a weeks menu, using this planner, far quicker that any other way.