Balancing Motherhood’s Gift Guide 2010: e-Mealz Meal Planning

This is one of my favorite gift ideas. Perfect for the busy family: e-mealz family meal planning. My husband emailed me one day at work and sent me a link to this website where you can pay for meal planning each week. I was skeptical at first, but he was surprisingly interested.

Dinner planning and meal prep is definitely a constant struggle for me and my family. With two small kids and two working adults, getting a good meal on the table day in and day out gets difficult, if not impossible. Who has time to write down what you are going to each for dinner every night for one week, then create a grocery list from that, match is against any in-store sales and go to the store. E-mealz does all of this for you — except the going to the store part. *End corny voice over that makes this sound like an infomercial.*

I won’t wait until the end of the post to say that I am not paid by e-mealz to say all this. I used to have an affiliate link on my site because I wanted to tell people about this all the time (and, hey maybe make a couple bucks, but I took it down so that I won’t have any conflict of interest. Plus, I never made a penny from the link.)

So, the corny announcer text above convinced me to give e-mealz a try for 3 months (their base subscription). I figured all I could lose was $15. I was pretty sure we would cancel after the three months. That was about 9 months ago.

We choose the Publix familly of four plan and quickly realized how much time this was saving us each week. No longer did I have to ask my husband, or him ask me, “what’s for dinner?” Our typical response was, “I don’t know.”

While it’s not a perfect system: you may not like every menu item (there have been a few bombs), but it got us on a schedule. And, I love that my family has been exposed to new meals. The recipes are all easy and, normally, quick.

One of the coolest features is if you choose the meal options for a local grocery store, the e-mealz staff uses items that are currently on sale to create their menus. The accompanying grocery list that you get with each weeks meal schedule and recipes lists every item you need to purchase, the price and what your total bill will be. They also have a variety of plans to choose from: for those counting points on Weight Watchers, different grocery chains, low carb, low fat, for 4, for 2 … so many options. How great is that?

While my husband and I were attending Financial Peace University this fall, several people in my group started talking about ways to save money on groceries. We mentioned to our group that we were using e-mealz and about three of the couples started using it on their own. One was already using it. Throughout the rest of the course we found that we all kept talking about how much we enjoyed this as a service. It’s been really helpful and would make a great present for any busy family.

Related:

• e-mealz.com