Making Dinner Planning a Breeze with DinnerTool.com

I used to love to plan meals and cook up a storm…on the weekends and before kids. With a husband in the restaurant business (the LAST thing he wants to do is be in the kitchen after work) and two toddlers, I’m constantly kept on my toes by the inevitable question of “what’s for dinner?”

I recently did the math and I need to come up with some 180-200 dinners a year! We usually do one night a week of leftovers, frozen pizza or take out and two nights a month we tend to eat out as a family. Breaking that down I need about 15 go-to recipes a month that I can do easily and quickly. If you’re like me, you are either running out of recipes, not having all the ingredients for what you want to make, not making the recipe you intended in time and some things have gone bad or just plain bored with your options.

Dinner planning made easy with DinnerTool

What I originally believed to be a never-ending battle has now become a no-brainer with Procter & Gamble's new website DinnerTool.com. This site contains countless delicious looking recipes and makes it easy to plan menus ahead of time so that you can shop efficiently. Their Recipe Generator feature lets users sort through recipes based on specific ingredients, cuisines styles, dietary restrictions, and four of their basic prep categories: “Easy, Fast, Healthy, and Budget-Friendly.” I found their website to be really user friendly, and there were a ton of tasty looking vegetarian and Spanish style recipes that I definitely plan to try.

In my opinion the best part of the site are the Meal Planner and Shopping List features. The Meal Planner is basically a daily, weekly, or monthly menu planner, where all you have to do is drag and drop recipes your interested in preparing, and BAM! you are ready to go.

That’s where the Shopping List comes in handy, by exporting all the ingredients that you will need for that day, week, or month into a printable format. What’s really cool is that this feature will calculate the number of times a particular ingredient comes up in your meal plan, and will give you the total amount you will need so you can buy all the materials in one trip. I also appreciate the site’s My Recipe Box feature, which lets you store all your favorite recipes in a personalized file so you can reuse the recipes you found and enjoyed.

Along with getting some great recipe steals, you can also upload some of your own recipes to the site and specify whether you want to share them with others or keep them for your own private file. But for me one of the fun things about the website is the constant exchange of new and interesting recipes between users. If you’re interested in learning more, just visit www.dinnertool.com.

At the DinnerTool event

Check out this video about the "What's for Dinner?" with Chef Ariane Duarte event I attended to learn more about DinnerTool!

Disclosure: Michelle attended an event hosted by P&G to learn more about DinnerTool.com.