My never-ending struggle with dinnertime is a legend now. I’m in a slump right now, admittedly, but over the last year and a half I have had bursts of energy and creativity with dinner that have kept my family eating healthy, our grocery spending manageable, and and me in a good mood because I’m sticking to a routine.
What works, as you will read anywhere and everywhere, is having a plan.
SmilingCooks.com is a service that helps you plan dinner a month at a time. With an interactive calendar function, you can choose recipes and number of servings for each day, then save all that information and print out a grocery shopping list so you are armed with information before you even leave your house to go to the store. The service was created by Tarah Sproul, a mother of two who has beaten cancer and works in the healthcare field. Not wanting to sacrifice wholesomeness to the altar of saving time or money, Sproul built SmilingCooks.com as a resource for busy families who want to eat healthy meals.
I tried to use the subscription service ($5.95 per month) in the way it was intended. Really, I did. But because I tried it during the end of the school year and the early summer, our family’s schedule was chaos, and I didn’t plan well around it. I managed to make a few of the recipes just to make sure they were indeed easy and tasty, which they were. But I failed to take advantage of the cool interactive menu planning function, which really allows the user to customize the recipe choices to a degree that another menu planning service I have used does not.
In other words, SmilingCooks.com lets you use your brain, and my brain was not at all interested in planning our menus over the last few months. I can barely drag myself to the grocery store these days, much less take that extra step of planning ahead.
While I am in no hurry for time to advance any faster than it already does, I do look forward to the return of school and with it, a regular, dependable schedule, when I will know ahead of time what nights everyone will be home to eat dinner. And I am glad there are services like SmilingCooks.com that help moms like me make plans.
I received a trial subscription to SmilingCooks.com to facilitate this review.
This was so interesting to me…as I have lost interest in cooking as a grandmother who does a lot of grandchild watching. From my perspective this could be a great service. I cooked dinners for three generations for many years while my own kids were growing up and am now just out of creativity many nights.
I wonder whether Smiling Cooks would be adaptable for my demographic, MidLifeBloggers. We’re still in the kitchen but, as Lorette says above, our creativity has been taxed over the years.
I understand what Jane is saying. Sometimes we get bored with cooking and just need new ideas to get us going again. Smiling Cook helps to bring me up to date with current recipes and meal plans. Works for me!
I’m right there with Jane. My cooking creativity is zilch and I’ve let Dad take the lead on choosing what to have for dinner.
Like you said, it’s all in the planning and being prepared. The thing I like about your description of this web site is that in addition to printing out a grocery list, one can just transfer those items to an online grocery shopping service (like Peapod here)and never have to enter a grocery store!
I’ll have to check this out!