eMeals has provided me with a subscription to their service so I can put it through its paces and tell you all about it. I’m wrapping up my first week of eMeals, which I’ll tell you more about tomorrow. Today I’m going to give you some overall thoughts on how eMeals works for us so far.
What we liked about eMeals out of the box:
- We are eating more fresh veggies than usual. We are big salad lovers, but I usually take the lazy way out on the veggie side and just nuke a bag of frozen vegetables. Fine, if you just want to tick the box on “ate my veggies” at dinner time, but not nearly as delicious as it could be. Having a plan for fresh veggie sides for the week has meant I am stretching myself to prepare them and that we are actually eating them, rather than finding them, spoiled, at the back of the fridge.
- The weekly plan included using up ingredients that you don’t finish in previous recipes. We used half a package of cheese in one recipe and the rest in another. Ditto on some tomato sauce- we finished the leftover jar on another recipe.
- Less food waste. See above.
- I am trying new things! Our first plan included Moussaka. I would never have thought of making Moussaka on my own. It was on the list so I gave it a shot and we liked it!
- The mobile app is AWESOME! I don’t have to add the ingredients to a list. (You can print your list from the PDF you get in your email.) When I forgot my printed list in the car, I was able to pull it up on my phone. (Yes, I really did that my first time out. Yay me.)
How I used eMeals to my advantage:
- When I printed out my PDF, I took the list to the store, and then I put the recipe list on the refrigerator. I referred to the recipes while I unpacked the groceries and put them away. If a recipe said I needed to cut the meat into strips, I cut it into strips and put it in a ziploc bag labelled with the meal number.
- I wrote meal numbers on ingredients that my family would normally eat at will with a sharpie marker and masking tape. This meant they didn’t eat all the shredded cheese and leave me with a nasty surprise at dinner time.
What other moms said
I showed the eMeals meal plan and mobile app to other moms. Busy Work Away Moms, moms who have never enjoyed cooking or meal planning, and other food-loving SAHMs like me. Here are some notes from their comments:
- Having a weekly plan already loaded into your phone could save your butt on a particularly busy week.
- Having the week’s recipes laid out will help with sharing the cooking duties with a spouse who isn’t used to doing the cooking.
- Menu planning and shopping are one of the things that are hard when, for instance, pregnant women are on bedrest, and having a ready-made solution could be a huge stress relief.
- Time not spent figuring out what to make is time you can spend with your kids.
Perhaps you’d like to try a sample menu.Their page says “Over 50 plans available!”
I would like to get in on meal planning, so maybe I will check them out. Thanks for the help.