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Say Mmm makes it easy to organize meal and recipe ideas from anywhere in one place and easily use those ideas in meal plans and shopping lists. And now it’s even easier to use your favorite meal plans, because you can save the whole set of ideas as a plan. Then anytime you want to use the plan, just add a whole plan to your calendar with a few clicks, generate your shopping list, and you’re good to go. Plus when you add a meal plan to your calendar, you can still switch things around and customize it based on current specials or something new you might want to try. The difference is it’s much easier to start from a whole plan and swap things out than recreate a similar meal plan.

My Meal Plans - Organize and sort your meal plans in one place by naming and adding notes and tags to your plan for easy fugure reference.

Meal Plan Details - View your plan by day and meal, click to view all the recipes in that plan on one page, and easily add the plan to your calendar and autogenerate your shopping list.

How it Works - From you’re My Meal Plans page, click to add a new plan and then just select the days of the calendar with the items you’d like to save in a plan and add a name, description, and a few tags if you would like (they need to be in your plan calendar somewhere before saving the meal plan). You can save 8 weeks of meal plans or two months of meal plans (60 days total) for free or up to a year’s worth of plans (360 days) with Say Mmm Plus.

Posted by Brian

Say Mmm makes it easy to save all your meal and recipe ideas from anywhere in one place and use them in meal plans and grocery lists. By adding grocery lists to ideas and recipes, you can save time and automatically generate a shopping list organized by area of the store with common pantry items separated out, and you can create a grocery lists from whole meal plans or by adding individual ideas and recipes to your list.

There are a lot of great recipe ideas out there on websites and blogs and in cookbooks, and Say Mmm helps you organize and use those ideas. A lot of our users save and use recipes from Kraft, so we thought it would be helpful to be able to find and use Kraft recipe ideas with Say Mmm grocery lists. So now users can search right from the home page through thousands of Kraft recipes and click to save them to their recipes or meal plans, and when they are added to shopping lists all the items they need to buy are organized for them. Then when cooking the meal, its easy to find the recipe again and click on the link to view all the details on the Kraft website.

Posted by Brian

Say Mmm has easy ways for bloggers to add a published shopping list to a recipe so readers can just click to print out what they need to get at a store, organized by area of the store. Items from multiple recipes can easily be combined or put into a full meal plan of recipes, like this grocery list on Home Ec 101.

Now we have added a way to create a published shopping list for any list, which has the additional advantage of being able to add in items that aren’t recipes. For example, in a meal plan there are often times that you might include side items, drinks, or simple things you wouldn’t need a recipe for. So now you can just add things like broccoli, French bread, wine, cheese sandwiches directly to the list and publish it. In addition to helping bloggers publish shopping lists for meal plans, anyone can use published lists to easily share their shopping list, and they can just send the link to anyone to view and print the list.

To publish a list, just click on the “Publish” link on the left hand area of any shopping list, and then get the link to add to a website or share via email on Facebook or Twitter or wherever.

Publishing the list:

Viewing the published list:

Posted by Brian

It has been a very sad week for Japan, with the terrible disasters and damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami followed by long, hard days of efforts to help survivors and of tense struggles with nuclear reactors. We have family in Japan, and luckily they are farther inland and were safe from the destruction along the coast. The silver lining of the tragedy has been in the perseverance of the Japanese in working together to help each other and in the outreach and caring of people around the world.

It isn’t always easy to know how to help out, so we wanted to share one of many inspiring ways people are reaching out to help.  The information on these blogs is very helpful, and their creative way of empowering people to contribute through donations, prayers, and even just comments is impressive.

A Thrifty Mom

Bargain Blessings

“Cents”able Momma

Frugal Coupon Living

Groupon Girl

IgoBOGO

MoJo Savings

Moms Need to Know

Nicole’s Nickels

Penny Pinching Mom 

Passion for Savings

Saving with Shellie

She Saved

Surviving the Stores

We have made our contributions to the American Red Cross.

Posted by Brian

Check out the latest updates on the mobile site! It looks a lot better, and we have redone the navigation and look and feel of the pages to make the site cleaner and easier to use.

The Say Mmm mobile site is designed for smart phone browsers to be simple and fast, and uses web-based technologies to make it work more dynamically and feel more like an app. It works well for iPhones (or iPad/iPod touch), Android, Blackberries, and Palm phones and devices. You can bookmark the m.saymmm.com site in your browser, and even add a short cut to most phone desktops, so you can just click to get to the site, like you would for an app.

Here are some updated views of the plan and shop areas on the mobile site:

• Plan – Plan your meals from your sofa, and remember what you are having for dinner from anywhere.
• Shop – View and check off items on your grocery list while in the store, and add ideas to remember when you think of them.
• Find – Take your recipes and restaurant ideas with you, and easily find newideas whenever you need them.

Posted by Brian

Say Mmm makes it easy to save all your recipes and recipe links all in one place, and you can view them privately or share with select friends. With our publishing features, blogs and websites also create and manage a recipe index with grocery lists, so readers can easily find new ideas and just click to print the recipes or combine grocery items from multiple recipes into a single printable list. Readers don’t even need to log in and can do everything with just a few clicks.

Here are a couple of the larger collections of recipe indexes to check out at Home Ec 101, Organizing Junkie, and Heavenly Homemakers. And here is one of the latest ones from Mom’s Menu Planning.

We are also happy to announce that we now have a hosted recipe option feature for people that would like to publicly share a list of their favorite recipes and links, and they can add grocery lists or printable recipes for friends and family to use without having a Say Mmm account. All they have to do is send them a link.

Another nice thing is that the index is automatically updated as new published recipes are added to the account, and will show links for printable grocery lists and printable recipes based on whether that information has been added to the recipe. Here is an example of how it works for recipes from The Happy Housewife and from our web discoveries from different sites.

We found this series about grocery shopping by a group of bloggers with larger families, and we thought it was pretty cool that they shared their perspectives and tips on grocery shopping.  If you have a large family, you may already know of some of the extra challenges of planning to buy larger quantities of food, stretching the budget even more with smarter shopping, taking an entourage of kids with you on adventures to the grocery store, and spending up to half a day getting things bought and organized.  There are lots of good ideas for meal planning and grocery shopping that apply to any family.  Here are the blogs to check out:

Carrie @ Our Full House

Christi @ Ants on a Farm

Elizabeth @ Yes They’re All Ours

Kathy @ Kathy Mom of Many 

Kristy @ Homemaker’s Cottage 

Lori @ Happy Busy Mama

Monica @ Natural Mama

Renee @ Bakers Dozen

We recently added some new integration to make it easier to add recipe and meal ideas directly to your meal plan and to shopping lists. In the plan area, now when you click to add an item, in addition to being able to type a few letters to bring up your meal ideas, there is also a “My Ideas” link that will bring up a window for viewing and adding any of your meals, recipes or restaurants. Just click to add a meal or combine multiple recipes into a meal. If you have a lot of items you can also type in a few letters to search through the list.

In the shopping list, there are couple ways to pull in shopping items for recipes. You can just type the recipe name or pull in recipes and meal ideas from your plan, and now you can also click to bring up a list of your recipes and click to add items from them, similarly to how it works in the plan area.

Posted by Brian

It’s nice to feel organized, but getting organized can seem like a hard or like an unattainable goal. One trick is to see organization as a process, and just get started in smaller ways, and before you know it you’ll develop habits that make staying organized easier.  To help you get started, we have put together some helpful tools and tips on getting organized, and are excited to be working with some of our favorite bloggers on this.

Meal planning

For parents in charge of meals for their family, a lot of time is spent planning, shopping, and keeping recipe ideas organized. Just creating a simple meal plan and grocery list on paper is a great first step in getting organized. Say Mmm offers a set of free online tools designed to be as easy and flexible as paper, but to automate things we do over and over. There are a number of basic recipe ideas on the site that have grocery lists and can be easily edited to individual tastes.  And even easier than that is getting meal and recipe ideas right on blogs that can be combined into a single list for shopping. Here are some new resources to check out with grocery lists done for you:

• Meal plan ideas – Want some help pulling it all together? Here are full meal plan ideas from people that make planning look easy, and you can just click for a full organized grocery list. 
• Family favorites from Org Junkie – Laura has put together a great collection of recipe ideas from sites around the web, and you can easily combine what you need for these ideas into one organized grocery list. 
• Ideas from around the web – We are encouraging bloggers to link up their favorite recipe ideas with grocery lists in the first collaborative collection of recipe ideas with dynamic grocery lists. 

Tips and strategies

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get organized.  Its more about finding what works for you. There are a lot of great ideas out there to help you get started, and here are some tips and strategies from people that know what they are doing. Check them out, get some ideas and leave a comment to win.

Organizing My Kitchen {and Yours Too!} from Finding Joy in My Kitchen
Breakfast Organization from Heavenly Homemakers
Getting Organized:  Menu Planning from Home Ec 101
Say Goodbye to Disorganized Meal Planning from Once a Month Mom
New Feature: Printable Grocery Lists + Giveaway om Organizing Junkie
Organize With Less from The Happy Housewife

Giveway

We are also giving away a few things to help you get organized. There are 40 signed copies of the new book, Clutter Rehab, with 101 helpful tips on getting organized, free 6-month trial subscriptions to Say Mmm Plus, and copies of Do the Funky Kitchen, an ebook on organizing your kitchen. Prizes are spread across the above sites, so check them all out.

What better way to learn about getting organized than from the Organizing Junkie herself? Laura’s site OrgJunkie.com is one of the best all-around sites for all-kinds of ideas organization, and her new book, Clutter Rehab, is a great compilation of some of her favorite and most helpful ideas. Its easy to read and packed with 101 tips that are simple to try out.

Say Mmm makes it easy to plan one or more meals a day in an online calendar you can see from any computer or a smart phone.  Sometimes its also helpful to print out your meal plan and post it on the refrigerator for an easy reminder or for others to see.  

We have had a simple way to print out meals in a list view, and based on a number of requests we have added the ability to print out plans in a calendar format, so its easier to see the different meals and days in columns and rows.  The “Options” link lets you adjust the number of columns to display based on how many meals per day you plan, and also to choose whether to show notes, calories, costs or just the meals.  

You can also copy and paste the calendar into an email or into a blog, and bloggers can choose to have any published recipes automatically linked from the calendar to their recipe posts.  These features work on most blogs that support HTML tables, but ironically tumblr doesn’t, which is where we host this blog, so we will just show images of how it looks on the website.

Calendar view

List view

The ideas in these example were taken from Heavenly Homemakers, a great place for meal ideas and here’s where to find the recipes for this meal plan.

Posted by Brian