Plan to Eat – Free 30 Day Trial & Meal Planning Giveaway
I’m excited to share with you a new meal planning solution and an awesome family-based company today!
I rely on meal planning. It not only makes my day go smoother because I don’t have to think about what’s for dinner that night, but it creates an opportunity for our family to gather at the table and share a meal once a day. It’s a tradition that Joe and I love.
Whenever I talk about meal planning, people tell me that they want to meal plan but it’s too difficult or it takes too much time.
Well, I’ve at an awesome, no-fuss solution for you – Plan to Eat!
There are a lot of neat things about Plan to Eat.
One of my favorite things is that everyone can try Plan to Eat for 30 days at no charge. Sign up here for your free trial.
Some of my favorite features include:
- Import your favorite recipes from any website with the click of a button using Plan to Eat’s bookmarklet. Here, I imported my Berry Lemonade Green Smoothie.
- Drag & drop meal planner – simply drag a recipe to the day and meal you’re planning on using it.
- Recipe ingredients are automatically exported to an editable shopping list divided by category, including amounts needed for each item
You can also add friends on Plan to Eat so that you can use their recipes, too. It makes establishing your recipe database much quicker.
When you sign up for your free trial, you can add me to your friends with the username “Simply Sugar and Gluten-Free.”
Ready for an annual membership? Get 30% off!
Plan to Eat is giving all Balanced Platter readers 30% off of an annual membership through July 31 with the coupon code: FabulousFood2013
The Giveaway:
Plan to Eat is giving threee (1-year) memberships valued at $39 each to Balanced Platter readers. Enter to win before May 25th!
To enter, fill out the form below. You can earn additional entries by:
- Liking Plan to Eat on Facebook.
- Signing up for a free Plan to Eat 30-day trial.
Contest guidelines: Contest runs until 11:59pm CST on Saturday, May 25, 2013. Winners will be notified via email and their names will be updated on this page.
Meal Planning at the Farmer’s Market
source: Heather Graffam
Whether you are a parent, a spouse, a student, or a professional, meal planning is essential to a healthy week of eating. Traditionally, you’ve started the meal-planning process by gathering recipes for the week and making shopping lists. But when you shop at the Farmer’s Market, you never know what you’re going to find. Once you embrace the excitement of the unknown, you will be surprised at how delightful the experience can be.
How to Meal Plan at the Farmer’s Market:
Should My Salad Be Organic? (and a Cucumber Chickpea Salad)
source: Kim Lutz
I spend a lot of my time thinking about food. Cooking food. Writing about food.
Even with all of that, I still sometimes get overwhelmed trying to figure out what food I should buy.
For example, when do I need to buy organic and when can I spare my overburdened food budget and buy conventional produce?
Lucky for me there’s help figuring that out. I check with the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Every year they produce a list of the “Dirty Dozen” — produce that’s the most impacted by pesticides when grown conventionally that you should buy organic. The current list includes these fruits and vegetables: apples, celery, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, grapes, hot peppers, imported nectarines, potatoes, spinach and strawberries. The current list also includes two additions: kale/collard greens and summer squash because when they were tested they carried residues of toxic pesticides that aren’t in use any more.
EWG also produces a list of produce that’s probably okay to buy conventional. These they call “The Clean Fifteen.” These include: asparagus, avocados, cabbage, cantaloupe, sweet corn, eggplant, grapefruit, kiwi, mango, mushrooms, onions, papaya, pineapple, frozen sweet peas, and sweet potatoes.
Keep reading!
Refreshing “Un-salad Salad” Lunches for Hot Weather
This guest post is from Primal Kitchen: A Family Grokumentary:
source: Primal Kitchen
In my family’s corner of the world, charmingly moderate spring temperatures were almost totally skipped this year! We went from winter weather to summer weather in the blink of an eye.
While one of my favorite ways to pack real food lunches in wintertime is to integrate some leftovers from the previous night’s dinner for reheating, the spike in temperature tends to make reheating a lot less appetizing. I’ve had to recalibrate our menus these days – including packed lunches – to incorporate more summer-friendly options.
These “un-salad” salad options are handy and delicious ways to get add lots of fresh veggies in you diet through unconventional salad adaptions! If you’d like to add other fresh vegetables, you certainly can but remember: not all vegetables do as well as spaghetti squash, broccoli slaw, and kale when sitting in a dressing overnight or even for a few hours. It may be useful to chop your other veggies and store them in a separate container to add to the rest of the salad immediately upon serving. Remember that vinaigrettes and other dressings, usually being acidic, are best stored in glass, ceramic, or stainless steel containers.
Here are my 3 favorite basic “un-salad” salads:
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