Home Economics in the Cyber Age

In my house, nothing is worse than that dreaded question "what's for dinner?".  Somehow it always seems worse in the winter, when all of a sudden my family only has 6 standard meals to choose from... and they are all boring us to tears.

One suggestion to alleviate the meal planning doldrums is to get the whole family involved in the meal planning process.  After all, your children won't be living with you forever (at least we hope not!) and so it doesn't hurt to add some Home Economics to your lesson plans.

I recently came across a clever website called Plummelo, which allows you to do some real easy menu planning.  You can find tons of different recipes by either browsing through Plummelo's online recipe box or by doing a keyword search.  They also have a menu planning feature that allows you to search for recipe ideas based upon: what ingredients you specifically want to use, dietary restrictions, or special occasions.   

 Best of all, once you have selected what recipes you want to make, you can automatically create a shopping list of all the needed ingredients.  When creating your shopping list you can do so for one recipe or multiple recipes.  You can even add other non-recpie related items (ex. toothpaste, toilet paper, bread, etc.) to your shopping list - so that everything you need at the store is "on the list".

Plummelo is a free web-based service.  All you will need to get started is have an email account and then you can access Plummelo from any computer or mobile device.  When using the program you will be able to save any recipes you find to your own personal recipe box.  Which means the next time you want the same recipe, you won't have to go searching through your kitchen to find it.  Instead, it will be waiting patiently for you in your Plummelo account.

You even have the option to upload your own recipes and designate whether you want to make them private or public.  I have quite a few recipes that are on bits of paper, stashed away in my cook books.  One of my favorite cookie recipes is almost in shreads now, so it would be an excellent one to add to my collection on Plummelo.

I think what I really like is that Plummelo is that it's just so easy to use.  Which means my kids and my husband have no excuse for not contributing a good suggestion for dinner.  We can all save recipe suggestions to Plummelo, which should gie us lots of new ideas.  Later on, we (or me) can go through all the saved recipes and delete any that are either too hard to make or don't have enough appeal to interest the whole family.

Finally, for those of you with a serious chef in the family, you can install a Plummelo browser button to their computer.  That way, when they are browsing other recipe websites (FoodNetwork, Epicurious, AllRecipes, etc.), with the just the click of a button they can save new recipes to your Plummelo account. 

So now that you know about Plummelo, your family has one less excuse for not knowing "what's for dinner".

Plummelo - One-click Shopping List