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You can save oodles of cash by planning your meals around the seasons.  Not only are certain fruits and veggies cheaper when they are in season, but you can also save money by taking advantage of the holidays as well.

You probably have a farmers market near you.  If you can get there when it is open, you can get some real deals on fruits and veggies that cost more at the supermarket (and probably aren’t as fresh).  What is fresh at what time depends on where you live, but unless you live in the Antarctic or the desert, you can probably find some fresh, locally grown fruits and veggies near you at some point in the year.  (You might even be able to find meat, eggs, and cheese!)

It may seem laborious at first, because most of us are not used to shopping this way (or eating this way for that matter), but once you get used to it, it really is worth the money you save and the health benefits.  Plan your meals around what is in season and on sale, and see if you notice a difference in your grocery bill!

Even if you can’t make it to a farmers market, try to learn which foods in your grocery store are in season, because usually, this will save you money.  There are many charts available online, like this one, showing you which veggies grow when and where.  There are also cookbooks that are arranged according to the season.

You might also want to take advantage of a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) if you can find one near you.  In a CSA, you pledge financial support to a particular farm, and then they give you food!  These are a lot like farmers markets in terms of cost and nutrition, but they can be more convenient.  Many of them offer delivery! 

If you want to really save money, you can plant a garden.  (Did I just hear you groan?)  A garden doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to be elaborate.  Just a single tomato plant on your front steps will save you money.  If you live in an apartment, you can hang a tomato planter out your window.  If your window doesn’t get any sun, find a garden co-op.  Many communities provide a space in which individuals can plant a few crops (and some of them even do it for free)!  Your family will certainly appreciate eating food you’ve grown yourself, especially if you have them help you pull the weeds.

You can also save money by stocking up on items during the holiday season, or immediately after.  Many grocery stores offer low prices on items that are quick to sell during a certain time of the year.  For example, in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, you can often get stuffing mixes, cranberry sauce, pie crusts, and gravy mixes for a real steal.  Then, in the days immediately following Thanksgiving, sometimes the deals get even better.  (This is hit or miss though because sometimes your grocery store really will manage to sell all of the stuffing.)

Posted by Robin

Meal planning helps us organize our time, especially our evenings. An organized family finds it easier to sit down at the dinner table together, and the more we learn about this practice, the more important we find it to be.

I’m not saying it’s easy. One kid has football practice. One kid has dance class. You wanted to get to the book club and your spouse has to work late. Schedules can get insane, especially when you try to squash all of these schedules onto one “family calendar.” But if you make it a priority to eat together, it is possible, at least most of the time.

Studies show that family members who eat together communicate better with one another and get along better. Parents and children are able to build stronger relationships just by having that time of the day, each day, to decompress together and to “check in,” to see how things are going.

Apparently, eating dinner with your children also helps them learn better. In 1994, Louis Harris and Associates had 1000 high school seniors take an academic test that included several personal questions. The survey showed that the kids who regularly ate dinner with their families scored better than those who didn’t. A similar study was done at the elementary level, and results were the same. It was even discovered that preschoolers whose families ate together had better language skills than those with no planned mealtime.

In fact, a 2007 study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that family dining is associated with lower rates of teen smoking, drinking, illegal drug use and prescription drug abuse. Teens are busy people, and are often the ones who miss out on family mealtime. But are they the ones who need family mealtime the most?

Researchers have also determined that families who eat together consume more healthy foods, and less junk food. Family mealtime provides an excellent opportunity for us adults to role model good, healthy eating habits that will ultimately guide our children through a lifetime of healthy eating!

And speaking of role modeling, family mealtime offers the perfect opportunity for us to teach our kids proper table manners and social skills. Go observe a lunch period at any local school, and I would almost bet you would observe an alarming lack of proper etiquette. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Sitting down together at the table now can prevent your children from making some embarrassing errors later in life.

Family mealtime can also be a great opportunity to expose your children to different cultures. Every once in a while, introduce a new dish to them, and take advantage of the opportunity to discuss where the dish hails from, and what the culture looks like in that part of the world.

The lives of children today can be stressful (especially for our teenagers). Having something in their lives that is pleasant and consistent can do wonders for their stress levels. Just knowing that they get to come home to a safe place, where they get to sit down with people who love them, and enjoy nourishing, life-sustaining food, will provide them with a sense of security that they are apt to carry with them for the rest of their lives, and eventually hand down to their children. Hopefully, around a dinner table.

Posted by Robin

You’ve probably heard it before:  failing to plan is planning to fail.  It’s especially true with meal planning.  And we’ve all been there:  It’s been a long day, then you get stuck in traffic, you finally get home, open the cupboards and … no food.  You’re starving and exhausted.  You certainly don’t feel like walking or driving to the grocery store.  And like I said, you’re starving.  So, you order a pizza.  Not exactly healthy.  Not exactly frugal.  Maybe not even that tasty (depending on how often you experience this crisis).

Bottom line:  we can do better. 

Even basic meal planning can save much time and effort.  You don’t have to get fancy.  You don’t have to list which spices you’ll need.  You can just plug in what meals you plan to eat and when!

And if you use an online meal planner, like the one available at Say Mmm, then the whole process is extra slick.  Everything is stored for you right on the website, and always within reach.  You can make changes quickly and easily, and don’t have to spend time searching for that tattered notebook, or a pen.  (People rarely misplace their computers.)

Meal planning is also helpful if you get an urge or an inspiration when you are not actively involved in meal planning.  So you are sitting at work, balancing a budget, and you think, wow, we haven’t had fish chowder in a while, that would be good, and you can take a quick break from your budget and plug that chowder in!  Then later, when you are actively meal planning, you don’t have to spend as much time staring at the wall thinking, because you’ve really been brainstorming all week.

And of course there’s the grocery list.  Meal planning saves oodles of time in both the writing of the grocery list and the implementing.  When it’s time to make the list, just consult your meal plan.  Then just hit the print button!  When you’re in the grocery store, your list will be organized and complete, and you won’t have to stress that you are not getting enough (or getting too much) food.

If you are one of those smart coupon folks, meal planning can make that process easier too.  Look at your meal plan, sort through your coupons, and put them all in a stack.  Or, sort through your coupons and use them to make the meal plan.  Either way, you are streamlining your process.  And streamlining always saves time.

Meal planning is especially helpful if you are a busy bee.  You can sit down with your date book or day planner and figure out which evenings will match with which meals.  Plan to have quick hoagies after the late afternoon soccer game.  Need to work Tuesday night?  Make sure there’s something in the freezer the kids can handle without you.  This way, you never end up getting home at nine in the evening, and find that the only choice left in the house is the frozen lasagna that takes three hours to cook.

No matter how you choose to meal plan, how sophisticated or complicated you want to get, there’s really no way it can’t save you time.  Sitting down on a Sunday afternoon (or whenever it is convenient for you) and planning out the whole week of meals will save you much time and stress over the next six days. 

And you will never find yourself staring into that empty cupboard wondering if you just might starve to death.  

Posted by Robin

Are you driving yourself crazy trying to pack lettuce into a measuring cup? Are you trying to keep track of how many grapes your toddler is spitting out, and subtracting that number from his daily fruit intake? Please stop. It doesn’t have to be like this.

When planning your family’s meals, try focusing on quality and variety, and let the numbers take care of themselves. Of course, there are a few tricks to remember!

• Eat lots, and lots, (and lots) of fruits and veggies. It would be difficult to eat too much! (And potatoes don’t count!)
• Whole grains are awesome. (Refined grains not so much.) Hide whole grain brown rice in the stir fry, or use whole grain lasagna noodles. They even make whole grain white bread now!
• Limit your fat intake to healthy fats, like the kind found in fish, nuts, and avocadoes.
• Be sure to consume calcium rich foods. For some families, dairy products meet this need. Other families turn to leafy green veggies to meet their calcium quota.
• Keep the following to a minimum: red meat, sugary drinks, and salts. 

So, how do you plan and prepare a balanced, nutritious meal, without doing the math? Variety is not only the spice of life, it is also the key to a healthy diet. I know that a lot of us get stuck in a rut that encourages us to cook the same thing every Tuesday – I do it too, trust me – but it’s advantageous to climb out of the ravioli-rut once in a while.

So, make it an adventure and take your time next time you are in the produce aisle. Buy something you have never tried, or something you haven’t had in a long time. Not sure how to prepare it? Many grocery markets have personnel there who can help you with that. If that doesn’t work, consult the good old-fashioned World Wide Web! Not sure you’ll like it? Oh well, what’s the harm done? Just don’t fill up your cart with seaweed. (Unless of course you know that you love seaweed.)

You can also work variety into a specific meal. Throw extra vegetables (or fruits) into your stir fry. (I hid some mango in mine the other night, and it was pretty tasty!) Serve a slice of watermelon with the meatloaf. Be creative. Challenge yourself to make each plateful a little surprising.

Sometimes it helps to think about variety in terms of color. When I serve tater tots and chicken nuggets, it doesn’t exactly look like an artist’s palette. But if you can work in three or four colors, you will ensure that your masterpiece is beautiful and nutritious.

Eating a variety of fresh, wholesome, quality foods ensures that our bodies will receive a variety of nutrients. We don’t always know what our bodies will need in a given day, but if we give our tummies a rich selection from which to choose, we can rest assured that our systems will fare well, thanks to our healthy fare!

Posted by Robin

To go along with the new features and website improvements this week, we have put together a new overview video that shows how the meal planning, grocery lists, and recipe organizer work together to make life easier for people.  The video also shows off the new interface and features of the much-improved grocery lists area, and it highlights a number of features that weren’t in previous videos like the list of meal ideas you can click to plan, new meal ideas, the friends list.

Check out the video below:

The posts on new product features have been a little sparse the last couple weeks as we have been working on a set of larger improvements to make meal planning and grocery lists even easier. We are happy to announce the launch of these new features tonight, and we will have posts with more details this week.

One of the more noticeable things include the weekly meal ideas and web discoveries that you can see from the home page when you login, and you can just click to add these to your plan and your recipes.

We have made a number of improvements to the shopping list that we think you will enjoy. You can add quantities to items, just click to add common items, and easily add frequent and common items by area in the store.

These improvements above are all part of the free Say Mmm service, and we are launching a new premium service, Say Mmm Plus, which adds a little magic to meal planning by taking even more of the work out of planning and creating grocery lists. With Say Mmm Plus, the grocery shopping list is included for all the new weekly meal ideas. So when you add these to a grocery list, it shows all the items to buy, separates out common pantry items to check, and groups items by area of the store. It’s simple to add or remove items, and then just print the grocery list or check off items on a smart phone.

Say Mmm Plus also provides the flexibility to edit and create grocery item groups for your own recipes and meals. So, for example, instead of writing out all the ingredients needed for lasagna each time, you can add them once and have them remembered for every time after that. Say Mmm Plus makes grocery shopping easier, and the more it is used the more grocery lists become automated and effortless.

Say Mmm Plus is free to try for two weeks and then only $3 a month, which is just ten cents a day. There is no commitment needed to try and you can continue to use all the other free features on Say Mmm if you decide Say Mmm Plus is not for you.

What is Say Mmm?

Say Mmm is a web application with a set of free tools for planning meals, organizing recipes, and making shopping lists.

Is Say Mmm good for food bloggers?

First and foremost Say Mmm is designed to be help people, especially busy moms, stress less and save time and money through better planning and organization. If bloggers think the tools are helpful to their followers, please share the concept. A more specific way Say Mmm is helpful to bloggers is it lets people easily save and organize direct links to recipes on blogs and websites. This makes it more likely people will use the ideas more often and return to the blog, where all the details and pictures are. Say Mmm also makes it easy for people to share these links with their friends. Big recipe sites have some tools for saving and using recipes (though not good ones in our opinion), but smaller sites and blogs don’t. So we think Say Mmm is good for people to organize links to food blogs, and for food bloggers to get more traffic to their site.

How does the recipe organizer work?

Say Mmm lets people save and organize their own recipes and Internet links. When people save links, Say Mmm acts just like an online bookmark that they can organize and click to go back to that site. There is an good article by Elise Bauer on creating your own cookbook on delicious, for those unfamiliar with social bookmarking. We like this idea, and think that delicious.com could be more delicious :)  Delicious is designed for bookmarking any web site, whereas Say Mmm is designed specifically for recipes, so we can help people do more with recipes (like adding them to meals and shopping lists). 

Do the links users enter in your site help my search rankings?

Since Say Mmm is mostly a private network, links that people add to your site neither help nor hurt your search rankings. They don’t help or hurt Say Mmm’s rankings either. The links work similar to a link that a person shares with friends on a private Facebook account. They are good for personal recommendations and bringing people to your site but don’t affect search.

Why are you showing a recipe from my site?

We do user testing to find the best ways to make it easy for people to discover and interact with new recipe ideas. One way we are experimenting with involves showing recipes spontaneously and making them easy to save, and we have selected a few recipes from a number of blogs we like to highlight to our users.  We let our users randomly browse through recipes from other sites within a frame. At the top of this frame are simple buttons for letting people go to the next idea and save a direct link to the page where the recipe is. The URL looks different to allow us to add the toolbar at the top for viewing the next ideas and saving ideas. This functions like a link to the site and doesn’t modify the site, so all the ad impressions work like they normally would. When a user chooses to save a link, it is the direct link to the site, not the modified link. The result is a fun experience for our users and driving traffic to sites for highlighted blogs.

Let us know any thoughts or comments you have at [email protected]. We love to hear from food bloggers.

Say Mmm makes it easy to organize all your recipes and recipe links in one place and to find what you need by searching for a particular item or sorting by categories. And now we have added a way for you to rate your recipes, so you can do quick sorts for your favorite recipes and can see at a glance which recipes you liked best.

You can add a rating after you first add a recipe or at any time by editing a recipe. Just click on the number of Ms you want to give the recipe, on a scale of one to five. So your favorites would be “5M” or “Mmmmm”. You can rate your average or daily meals as 3M or however you’d like to use ratings to help you remember what you liked or find what you are looking for faster.

The nice thing about rating your recipes is you can easily bring all your favorites to the top of your recipe list, just by clicking on the “M” in the column header. And when you do sorts by categories, ratings help your favorite ideas stand out from your other ideas, so as you add more recipes and ideas, you can still find what you are looking for quickly and easily.

There are a lot of great recipe ideas on the web, and Say Mmm makes it easy to save and organize them all in one place along with your own ideas. And for when you are looking for new ideas, we have added a simple and fun way to discovering new recipes from the best blogs and sites on the web.

To try it out, click on the “See recipes” button in the “Cook” area and and we will take you on a mouthwatering journey through popular and unique recipes that have been discovered by our users and approved by our editorial team.  Go through recipes by just by clicking “Next” in the Say Mmm bar at the top of the page and when you see something you like, click the “Save” button to add the link to your recipes.

Part of the fun of browsing through recipes from different sites is that you can discover ideas more spontaneously and see a range of styles. You can find recipes and ideas that you wouldn’t have normally thought to search for, and new blogs and sites that you might want to explore. Plus, one of the nice things about Say Mmm is that it is easy to save the ideas you find, organize them as you like, and share them with friends and family. It’s like a social cookbook that gets better as you use it.

We made the launch of Say Mmm official today with the release of our first press release. Yay!  Here is the release below:

New Food Website, Say Mmm, Helps People Go From “Hmm” to “Mmm”

Say Mmm lets users manage all their cooking and dining ideas in one place, save time with smart planning features, and enjoy discovering new ideas spontaneously from friends and family.

Sunnyvale, CA (PRWEB) April 20, 2010 – “What to eat?” Short on time, with hungry mouths to feed, and ideas scattered across multiple books and websites, deciding what to eat can be a real challenge. For a busy mother, it’s the most stressful part of cooking.

Now there is a new website, Say Mmm (www.saymmm.com) that is helping people spend less time worrying about food and more time enjoying it. Unlike most food sites, Say Mmm lets users do more with what they already know, and makes discovering new cooking and dining ideas more spontaneous through sharing. “Everyone has good ideas, and we get new insights all the time from various places. It’s just a matter of having easy ways to organize and use them.” says Say Mmm CEO, Brian Hutchins. On Say Mmm, users can save all their meal, recipe, and restaurant ideas in one place, and view them from any computer or smart phone. The meal planning, grocery shopping, and other features help save time and money by automating repetitive tasks and making personalized coupon suggestions.

Say Mmm further differentiates its service with a strong focus on sharing with friends and family. From swapping recipes, to comparing favorites, to displaying meal plans, the site makes it easy for users to share what they want with people they know. “We learn things naturally in social contexts, with little effort spent searching or evaluating. Seeing what friends and family are eating is one of the best ways to pick up new cooking or restaurant ideas, and its fun.” says Hutchins.

As social networks like Facebook and Twitter grow in popularity, people are sharing more of their lives, and Say Mmm offers new ways to interact with friends around food ideas. “I believe we are still in the early stages of the social networking phenomena,” says Hutchins, “As Twitter co-founder Evan Williams tweeted ‘Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible.’”