How to use Build a Menu To Save Time and Money As a Busy Mom
I’ve used digital meal planners and paper planners. In fact, I created a printable meal planner. At different times, both have worked. It all depends on your needs, personality, and the type of features you’d like in a “meal plan.” I recently came across Build a Menu and can’t speak highly enough about it. (Note: if you’re a paper planner then this may be overkill for you).
Here are some of the features of Build a Menu:
- You can input then use your own family recipes
- You can choose a meal plan by Grocery Store
- Each meal has a price estimate
- Only takes minutes to build your meal for the week
- You can double or triple recipes (a must have for big families)
- Each meal plan has a corresponding shopping list
- You can choose between breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, cooking with kids, desserts, and more
- There are Trim Healthy Mama, Weight Watchers, paleo, gluten free, and allergy friendly recipes sorted by category so you don’t have to comb through.
- The ability to search for recipes by ingredient
Essentially, it’s all you need if you like to digitally plan meals and if you like to shop with budgets in mind.
Here are some of the cool highlights that Build a Menu offers. First, you get to start off your meal plan for the week depending on your grocery store. This helps them determine a price per meal for you and also gives you an idea of how much the total shopping list will cost. I think this is key if you’re trying to stick to a budget.
You are given the option to add meals in various categories on Build a Menu, but I usually only plan for dinner. However, adding breakfast and lunch and snacks will give you a better estimate of exactly how much it’ll cost at the store because of course we buy those things as well.
This is a good feature I loved that another digital meal planning service I tried did not have. You can double the recipe. Booyah! A must for larger families or if you like to batch cook and freeze one.
Here are some dinner recipe examples you can choose from that Build a Menu offers. You can sort by categories (ex: Trim Healthy Mama, etc.) and then choose which ones you want to add to cart. I love that the serving size is there as well, with a larger family you can’t have a 4 person recipe and not realize it until later.
Then this is the fun part. You can print the recipes off to put into your binder or keep in the kitchen, and print your shopping list. Then after you’ve done the planning you’re offline. I do not like reading recipes on screens so this is a big plus for me.
Right now Build a Menu is having an epic sale where you can get an entire year’s subscription for just $40. This is obviously the best value for money. That said, if you aren’t sure you’ll even use this program but want to try it out you can get a discount for your first month so you can see how it goes. Then, if you aren’t into it you can cancel.