Review and Giveaway! Relish! Weekly Menu Planner

I know, I know, Sundays are supposed to be reserved for conversation, but I've been dying to share this fantastic new website with you, so here is a Sunday review instead!

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You call your husband up at work sometime between the late morning and early afternoon to inquire about what he wants for dinner. The answer? I don't care. Very helpful, right? We'd gotten to the point where I was tired of choosing what my family was going to eat every single night. I'd have every intention of making a nice dinner, wait until it was way too late in the afternoon to get started and realize I didn't have the ingredients to make anything! This meant either running to the grocery store last minute, several times a week with two children, or ordering delivery, both of which are hard on the wallet. Something had to be done. Then, I discovered Relish!, an online meal planning service. My whole way of looking at meal planning and grocery shopping has changed thanks to a little help from Relish!

Click on Read More! below to read my review of Relish! and to find out how to win a 12-month subscription to Relish! for yourself.
I've been using Relish! to help with my weekly meal planning for a little over a month, and I'm hooked. The concept is very simple. Each week, Relish! publishes a set of 15 new recipes complete with side dishes. All you have to do is login and browse through the weekly menu. You choose the five meals you want to make, choose the number of people you will be serving, and Relish! then creates a printable grocery list for the week, as well as the recipe cards! It's that simple. All of the recipes are coded to help you decide which meals might work best for your family that week. Maybe you're looking for kid-friendly meals or you know you're going to be really busy on Wednesday and would appreciate the easy of a crock pot meal. If you're busy in the mornings, you can always avoid the meals with morning prep because they are coded, too. Plus, each month, a set of 10 new freezer meals is published as well. You can choose up to 5 of these, print your shopping list, and then just spend one Sunday afternoon getting them all prepared and you'll be ready for 5 of those unpredictable days where nothing seems to go right!

Relish! has a ton of other features as well. They have a section devoted to desserts and a section for hors d'oeuvres. They also have a Dinner and a Movie section. Relish! provides appetizers, dinners, side dishes and desserts to go along with 13 different family movies. I wish my kids were old enough to get into this now because it looks really fun. There's an Easter menu tab and a section with 2 weeks worth of kid friendly lunches for inspiration, too!

You can add recipes your family enjoyed to a customized "recipe book" of your favorite recipes, and then add them to your weekly menu when you're hungry for them, too. We've been using the service for 4 weeks and have a list of 6 favorites right now. My favorites are always the ones that my whole family ends up eating which every parent knows are hard to find! I haven't begun reusing my favorites yet because we've been having so much fun trying out new recipes, but I love having them right there on my menu planning page. I won't have to dig around for lost recipes in a books or boxes anymore!

Below you'll find our traditional Kid Buy Products starred review. There's so many features that I want to cover, that I'm going to break it down into several categories with each being based on a 4-star scale.

Functionality ***1/2 - This is of the website as a whole. The site is very straight-forward. Every Thursday, you will get a little update email from Relish! The updates have ranged from spring cleaning help to tips on feeding a teenager. This is your "reminder" that the new meals are posted. Next you just log on to your Relish! account, click on the weekly menu tab, and it takes you right to the new menu planning page. Very simple. You just browse through your new 15 choices and click on the ones you want to make. I LOVE that each meal comes with a side dish because I've always struggled with side dish ideas beyond salads and mashed potatoes. My only complaint is that you can't mix and match the side dishes. I like the side dish suggestion, but I would like it if there was some way to substitute out one side dish for another. For example, this week we're having Crispy Chicken Tenders with steamed broccoli, but I'm sort of intrigued by the green beans and walnuts that go with the Pineapple Chicken which we are not having. My way around this is to print off the side dishes that I want independently, but then I do have to go and update my shopping list. And, speaking of the shopping list, I love it! It's broken down into sections including one that lists all the staples that you might already have. Yes, you have to go through this part of the list, but I rarely buy anything off of it, and never come up short an ingredient when it's time to make dinner. Another nice feature is that each main dish and side dish meal prints off on one piece of paper, making finding the recipe and preparing the meal so easy. You can customize the menu for the number of people. We usually do two which is enough for my husband and me and the two kids, but remember, mine are 1 and 3. They don't eat that much. When my MIL was in town last week, I requested recipes for 4, and we usually had enough leftovers for one person for lunch the next day. I appreciate the accuracy of the meal planning as it has cut down on our food waste significantly.

Prep/Clean-up Time **** - I've been keeping a nerdy little spreadsheet with my ratings of each recipe for the last month. Out of the 20 recipes that we've tried, I've only had one meal come up with less than 4 stars. ONE. I've noticed a lot of things that have changed with the use of Relish! First, when a recipe says it takes 30 minutes, it takes 30 minutes. Plus, most meals don't take any longer than 30-40 minutes to prepare, and most of that time is not prep time. Second, the preparation of both the main and side dishes are usually very simple to do simultaneously. Nothing is waiting in the warming drawer while I finish up something else, but, and here's the best part, I'm usually almost completely finished cleaning up the kitchen when I sit down to the meal. After dinner, there's just a few minutes of clearing plates and washing up the last pan or two. It's simply amazing how much more fun it is to cook and eat a meal when the clean up isn't hanging over your head the whole time. Plus, I have spare time to make sure all the extras for the kids are ready too which means we're all eating a warm dinner TOGETHER!

Taste *** - We've had some misses, but mostly hits. However, if I was to randomly pick 5 new meals out of a cookbook every week, I feel like we'd have about the same success rate. Nothing has ever been inedible, but there are some tastes that we've loved, some we haven't. I'd say that on average, each week we add one to two recipes to our favorites list. Two meals are good, but not anything we have to eat again right away, and then every couple of weeks is a recipe we feel we wouldn't want to eat again. Only one meal out of 20 has been a total disappointment. (Incidentally, it was the same one that didn't get a 4-star prep/cleanup. I wonder if the two are related?) For vegetarians, know that there are at least 5 recipes for you each week, too. The kid friendly meals are always the most well received at my house, and I've enjoyed being able to just make one meal for everyone!

Cost **** - This refers to the meals themselves. I've cut down our grocery bill significantly with the use of Relish! The meals don't usually require a lot of special ingredients and I've stopped going to the grocery store multiple times a week, except for maybe a milk run. If I was better about shopping alongside the weekly sales flyer for our grocery store, I'm sure I could cut out even more from our weekly expenditure just by picking recipes that match up with what is on sale that week. Baby steps, right? I usually make a menu for two which allows both my husband and I to eat enough to feel satisfied with just enough leftover to feed the kids, too. We rarely eat have to eat leftovers which I enjoy, but I'm not throwing away food, either.

Price *** - The price refers to the website. Yes, this service is going to cost you, but only $7 a month if you pay in 3 month increments. (You can save 30% by paying for an entire year in advance.) For $1.75 per week, I no longer have to argue with my husband about what we're going to eat; I can get in and out of the grocery store in 30 minutes, with my preschooler in tow; have limited prep and cleanup; have cut down on both are grocery and dining out expenditures; and have been able to sit down to dinner as a family with warm food 5 nights a week!

Overall Rating *** 3/4 - We've been using Relish! just long enough now that I can't imagine how I would plan five unique meals on a budget by myself anymore. Not only have we begun living on a pretty strict grocery budget, but we've also cut down on the number of meals out we eat per week, too. The novelty of the new meal every night makes up for not being able to dine out as frequently. My MIL liked the site because you can easily adjust the meals to feed just two people meaning this is not just a site for moms with kids at home, either. It's for anyone who wants to simplify meal planning, prep and clean-up while still being able to enjoy a delicious and new meal every night of the week. While I feel like I've covered a lot for you today, there is still so much more for you discover at Relish! Check it out at http://www.relishrelish.com/. There is no doubt that I will be extending my subscription once my trial period runs out!

Are you looking for help with mealtime at your house? The Good People at Relish! are offering Kid Buy Products readers the chance to win a 12-month gift subscription to Relish! - a $58.80 value! To enter, please leave us a comment on this post telling us why you need the help of Relish! We will choose one winner using random.org. All comments must be received by 11:59 CST on Monday, April 13, 2009. Winners must be 18+. Please read our giveaway rules here. Thanks for reading and Good Luck!