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Here are a few of the recipes on food blogs we liked this week, and printable grocery lists for the recipes.

Cottage Cheese Pancakes - Cottage cheese adds protein and more nutrition to these pancakes from Weelicious. Recipe  Grocery list

Fish Tacos with Strawberry-Cucumber Salsa - The sweet and cool salsa goes nicely with the fish in this recipe from Perry’s Plate. Recipe  Grocery list

Green Chile Hominy Casserole with Chorizo - An old fashioned Southern side dish with chiles, sausage and some other good things mixed in from the Homesick Texan. Recipe  Grocery list

Pumpkin Soup - Perfect fall fare that is easy to make from Guilty Kitchen. Recipe  Grocery list

Chorizo Black Bean Soup - A very nice balance of flavors and textures in this soup from $5 Dinners. Recipe  Grocery list

Garlic Rosemary Chicken and Potatoes - A tasty version of basic chicken and potatoes in a slow cooker from Eat at Home. Recipe  Grocery list

Brown Butter Pumpkin Mac and Cheese - Add a rich pumpkin flavor and more fiber to mac and cheese with this one for BrokeAss Gourmet. Recipe  Grocery list

Our premium Say Mmm Plus service had a feature for automatically adding all the grocery items needed for meals and recipes to shopping lists, and we have decided to make part of the free Say Mmm service. We have gotten some good feedback on this feature and how helpful it has been to some of our users. Here is one of our favorite comments we have heard related to this feature:

“I make tuna casserole almost weekly. (Okay, I admit it: the only time I don’t make tuna casserole is when I forget to.) If I had to actually write down the fifteen ingredients in my tuna casserole every time I created a grocery list, I think I would go insane. First, I’d have to find a pen. Then I would have to sit still for five minutes, not freaking out while children crawled all over me trying to steal my pen. It was probably a mother like that who invented Tuna Helper.”

This grouping feature makes creating grocery lists a lot easier. For any recipe or meal idea, just add the grocery items needed once, and after you can just click or type the recipe name to have all the items needed pulled into your grocery list. 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. The more you use Say Mmm, the more grocery lists become automated and effortless.

There are also meal and recipe ideas each week that can be saved and added to your meal planning calendar. Since the grocery list for these items is already included, all you have to do is add the recipe to the shopping list, and it will show all the items to buy and the common pantry items to check. Plus the items are organized by area of the store to save time shopping. See a video of how it works.

While we are making the grouping feature free, we are also making the storage limit for recipes more explicit. We didn’t really have a stated limit before, but are now limiting the number of free recipes that can be saved and organized to 100, and unlimited recipes would be part of the Say Mmm Plus plan. We have found a hundred recipes is a lot to work with for most users, and for those that would like to store more, we hope it is worth the $3 a month to help offset some of the costs of providing the service. Say Mmm Plus also comes with extra features, like price tracking and calorie counting, and doesn’t have ads. For current users with more than 100 recipes we have given them all higher limits.

Posted by Brian

Stockpiling. Does the word bring to mind piles upon piles of cans and jerky and maybe even some Spam while air raids are going off?  No? Well, good.  That’s not what I meant.

A stockpile is simply a supply of something stored for future use. How does that help you save money at the grocery store?  Consider this scenario.  It’s late and you are tired.  Supper still needs to be placed on the table.  You haven’t made it to the grocery store in weeks.  You have no idea what to feed your family.  Instead of making a frantic dash to the store, you just calmly stroll to your pantry and peruse the shelves.  Sure enough, you find more than you need to put together a quick, delicious, and healthy meal from your own stockpile of food.

Stockpiling can also save you a lot of money. The first step in the world of stockpiling is the price book. A price book can simply be a small notebook or spreadsheet that you use to track the cost of food (or anything) at area stores.  Say Mmm has a feature for tracking grocery prices that makes creating a price book easy.  Whichever method you choose, note the cheapest prices you find and where and when you find it.  By doing this, you will begin to see trends emerge.  Pay attention!  When the item it at its lowest price, that is when you stock up.  By following the trend, you will discover the sale cycle.  Be sure you buy enough to last until the next sale cycle.

Beware of the fine print.  Sometimes, if a store is having a particularly great sale, they will limit the number of units you can buy.  For example, Triscuits are on sale this week, but I can only buy four boxes at the sale price.  If you notice the fine print, then go ahead and abide by it.  If you are really motivated, you can always come back in an hour and buy four more boxes of Triscuits.  If you don’t notice the fine print, but do notice that when they ring the product up at the cash register, the sale price doesn’t appear, then remember you can always say you’ve changed your mind.  Tell them you’ve decided you don’t like Triscuits and would only like four boxes, please :)

Also note what fresh produce is on sale. This is typically what is in season.  Either stock up at the grocery store, a farmer’s market, or directly from your own backyard garden.  Learn how to freeze or can or otherwise preserve your food.  Bake all that extra zucchini into zucchini bread now, freeze it, and you’ll have it to enjoy for a few extra months or have some to give out as gifts for the holidays.

Or, if you see a coupon that gets you particularly fired up, clip it, and then call your mother, your mother-in-law, and your best friend and ask them to clip it too.  Then you have four coupons for a favorite product, and you can stock up! 

Posted by Robin 

Here are a few of the recipes on food blogs we liked this week, and printable grocery lists for the recipes.

Chipotle Cheddar Corn Bread - A savory cornbread that goes well with honey from LunaCafe. Recipe  Grocery list

Crispy Tilapia Fingers with Lemon & Garlic Mayonnaise - Transform tilapia into something more sensational and kid-friendly with this recipe from Once Upon a Chef. Recipe  Grocery list

Pumpkin Pie Quinoa Parfaits - A fun snack that is tasty and pretty healthy from How Sweet It Is. Recipe  Grocery list

Sweet Potato Ravioli with Pecans and Herb Brown Butter Sauce - A homemade ravioli that is simpler to make than you would expect from A Cozy Kitchen. Recipe  Grocery list

Chicken Normandy - Named after the Normandy region of France, this dish from Simply Recipes highlights a classic combination of apple, brandy and cream flavors. Recipe  Grocery list

Tonkatsu Pork - Fried Pork. Japanese style with panko bread crumbs from Life’s Ambrosia. Recipe  Grocery list

Vanilla Rice Pudding & Chocolate Panna Cotta - Have a couple great desserts combined into one in this recipe from Tartelette. Recipe  Grocery list

Say Mmm has a free online meal planning calendar that helps people stay organized and view their plans by day, week, and month.  And we just added a few new features to this calendar as part of Say Mmm Plus for people that like to track the calories or the cost of their meals.

There are other calorie tracking sites that require people to select each part of a meal from a database of food items, but this can be time consuming and often there isn’t an exact match because even items with the same name can vary quite a bit based on the ingredients. For example, the number of calories in something like “Lemon chicken” depends on the recipe you follow. For this reason, many people just track calories on paper. The new calorie and cost features on Say Mmm aims to make tracking as easy as writing on paper, while automating some of the work.

In the new Calorie view of the planning calendar, you can enter calories for meals planned, and have the daily total calculated for you. Once a calorie count for a meal is entered, it is remembered, and will automatically appear anytime the meal is added to the meal plan calendar in the future, which is great for things you have often. The new Cost view of the planning calendar works the same way but with dollars, to help with estimating and tracking weekly and monthly budgets.

Both the calorie and cost views are integrated with the meal planning calendar so it is easy to see the current week or choose a specific day or week to view. The calorie and costs can also be printed out for keeping a written record or guide for the week.

Calorie view

Cost view

Posted by Brian

Here are a few of the recipes on food blogs we liked this week, and printable grocery lists for the recipes.

Shirley Temple Cupcakes - If you like the drink, try these cupcakes from Katie at the Kitchen Door. Recipe  Grocery list

Un-Baked Apples - A fun way to enjoy baked apple flavors without the baking from Big Red Kitchen. Recipe  Grocery list

Spaghetti and Cheese Nests  - A cute way to combine spaghetti and cheese together in little nests from Family Fresh Cooking. Recipe  Grocery list

Chicken Enchiladas  - The tangy roasted tomatillo chile salsa is the star of this recipe from Laura’s Best Recipes. Recipe  Grocery list

Mushroom & Blueberry Balsamic Pot Roast - An unexpected combo of blueberries and mushrooms liven up the sauce for this pot roast from the Noshery. Recipe  Grocery list

Mushroom Lasagna - A lighter vegetarian lasagna with a Parmesan white sauce from Smitten Kitchen. Recipe  Grocery list

Pumpkin Pie French Toast - You can have your pumpkin pie for breakfast with this recipe from Baking Bites. Recipe  Grocery list

On Say Mmm, we strive to make the best meal planning tools, and to do so we believe it is important to make the site as intuitive and simple to use as possible. People already have enough complicated things in their lives and never enough time, and our aim is to help save time with more efficient ways to plan. In planning meals, the biggest challenge for most moms is dinner time, so that is where we started with our free online meal planning calendar…making it easier to plan and get dinner on the table.

Some people like to plan all their meals, and now we have added the ability to plan for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a couple snacks. More importantly though is we have done this in a way that is easy to use and keeps it simple for those that primarily plan for dinners. We have managed to keep this balance by adding a new daily view for planning multiple meals in a day, while keeping the weekly view simple for our users that prefer to plan for one main meal a day.

The daily view works the same as the weekly view, except that meals are entered by type (breakfast, lunch, dinner, other) rather than by date.

The weekly view continues to work the same by allowing dinners for the week to be easily scheduled for the week. For those who do add more than one meal a day though, these can all be seen in the weekly view so it’s simple to see an overview of all the meals in the week.

We have also updated the printable view of the meal plan for those that like to keep a paper copy of their weekly or monthly plan. And the meal plan can also be shown in the context of the printable grocery lists when they are auto-created from meal plans.

Posted by Brian

There are a lot of great recipes online, and the unique pictures, stories, and comments connected with them give each recipe and blog its own style and flavor. It’s fun to discover new food ideas and try out new recipes. What’s less fun is going grocery shopping for the things you need and making sure you don’t forget anything. Wouldn’t it be nice if that new recipe you wanted to try had an organized grocery list that you could just click and print out?

Translating a recipe into a shopping list can take a little work. First, the ingredient information that you need when cooking is different from what you need to buy in the store. For example, a recipe may say “2 cups of carrots, thinly sliced,” when what you need to know in the store is just how many carrots to buy. Also, there are usually a number of pantry items or spices that people usually have and just need to check at home, rather than putting them into the shopping list. Another thing is if there is an ingredient you don’t normally use in a recipe, you may need to look for where to find it in the store. And finally, once you figure out all the ingredients you need, you then have to write them out on a list and combine them with other things you need to get.

With Say Mmm published grocery lists, now bloggers can help their readers out with printable, dynamic grocery lists for any online recipe. The blogger can define the items needed as they like and make it simple for readers to just click to view and print out an organized shopping list for one or more recipes. Grocery items can be organized by area in the store, and common pantry items can be grouped separately to save people time. The grocery lists are also individually customizable, and items can be added and removed based on what the person needs before printing.

Here is an example of a grocery list for our favorite enchilada recipe on Laura’s Best recipes. Printable grocery list

This service is free for blog readers, and users don’t need to have a Say Mmm account to create, modify, and print these published lists. The ability for bloggers to create these lists for their blogs is also free, and bloggers just need to have a Say Mmm account to manage the grocery lists for their recipes and to get the code they need. See how it works

Posted by Brian

Based on some things we have heard from users, we have added some new features to make the Say Mmm printable grocery lists even better.

Show the meal plan – When you auto-create a grocery list from your meal planning calendar, you can now show the related meals and dates at the bottom of the shopping list o help remember why you may need a particular item when in the store.

Two column list - There a couple ways to display a shopping list before printing, and now there is a new two-column list option. Of the other options, the “Paragraph” option is good for displaying a lot of items in a small space, and the “List” option is helpful if you want to see items all in a line and have some space to make notes next to them. The new two column format combines the advantages of these other options by fitting more items on one page while keeping them aligned in a list and leaving a little space for notes.

View items to check – For Say Mmm Plus users, you can now see the pantry items that you need to check at the bottom of your grocery list, which is helpful if you prefer to check them off on paper rather than in the “Items & Groups” view of your online shopping list.

Public lists – For quick lists or for people that want to see how Say Mmm grocery lists work before signing up, we have a public version of our online printable grocery lists.

Posted by Brian

The prices for most grocery items are constantly changing, and you can save a lot of money by learning a little about when and where to get the best grocery prices. Price notebooks can help with this, and to make price tracking even easier, we have added several new grocery list features to Say Mmm Plus.

Easily estimate and track budgets

You can now track the prices for items in your grocery lists. If you want to estimate a budget ahead of time, just fill in the prices and quantities for what’s on your list and the total is automatically calculated for you. You are less likely to be surprised in the store and you can check how you did as you update your list with the actual prices and quantities bought afterwards. As you are filling in prices you can easily see the price you paid last time for this item in the “Past” column and click to view the price history.



Spot sales quicker

Seeing the price next to grocery items on your list can help you find a specific item quicker by matching the price on your list to what’s in the store. Also, for prices you don’t know in advance you can compare your target price or price from last time to the current price to better judge whether it’s a good deal or not.



View your best price or history of prices for grocery items

Grocery stores have change prices on different items at different frequencies, which makes it hard to know the best price and when to get it. Plus prices often vary across stores. As you start to record the prices you paid for items though, you can easily see the best price or target price you should have for an item, and can start to see a pattern for prices of items you get regularly. You could even shop the same list at different stores to see a good comparison of which items are cheaper at which store.

Posted by Brian