If you cook a lot, you probably make some of your favorites pretty often. The alternative is something you can make fast. I know I get sick of having the same things over and over. If you want to explore a little and try different meals, you are going to dig Plummelo.

Plummelo is a meal planning toolbox. You can also think of it as delicious for cooking, a place where you find and bookmark useful recipe. You can collect recipes, plan meals then make a shopping list. Other sites I have tried that offer similar options. However, Plummelo offers some uniqueness to your digital recipe box. Read on to see how.

Note: We don’t usually talk about cooking, since that is not our forte. But Plummelo is really an useful site that makes our life much easier and we feel injustice not to talk about it.

Finding recipes

Once you’ve signed up for an account, it is time to find some yummy food to make. Plummelo lets you filter your recipe search a few ways. You can search by:

  • Main Ingredient
  • Course
  • Solution
  • Cuisine

This is a very helpful feature because the way they have the filters arranged makes searching a breeze. For example, you can select Irish from the Cuisine option. One of the recipes it will show is for Beef and Guiness stew.

Making a grocery list

Once you save a recipe, you can click on the My List tab at the top of the screen. This will display all of the ingredients for each individual recipe. This is the default.

When you click the View Combined List you will see everything you need to make all of the recipes in one big list.

You can remove items from the list by clicking on the Remove tab to the left of the ingredient. If you scroll down the page a little more, you will see some items grouped into categories. This makes it easier to shop quicker.

For items not automatically categorized, you can add them a category clicking Categorize Items in the top right of the ingredients windows.

Planning a meal schedule

At the time of writing, the planning option was not available because it was being improved. I can only speculate on what features it would have, so I will tell you what I would like to see.

  • Drag and drop arranging
  • Weekly grocery lists for easier shopping
  • Cost tracking if you input the price of the item
  • Integration with Google Calendar

Blog

I took a stroll through their blog and found it very worthy of adding it to my Google Reader. They give some great tips like How to Roast a Chicken or Cooking to Impress a Girl (on the Cheap).

Conclusion

Overall I have been very pleased with Plummelo’s ease of use and features. Like I mentioned above, it is the easiest and most feature-rich recipe site I have personally used.

I would love to see a mobile app, even if it was only access to the shopping list with a spot to check off the items as you find them at the store. Looking at an email on your phone and mentally checking off the items can lead to missed items.

Do you search for and catalog your recipes online? If so, how does Plummelo compare to what you use now?

Trevor is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from the Android OS to free web and desktop applications. When he is not writing about mobile productivity, He is coaching and playing the world’s greatest game… Soccer.

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