Review: Meal Mixer Menu Planning

After a new baby invaded our home seven months ago, I found little time for meal preparation, and even less for planning the menu in the first place. This resulted in lots of frozen meals and more eating out than this household had ever seen.

About a month ago, I decided it was time for me to get back in the game of housewifery, and one of my first stops along the way was finding a website that would plan my week's meals for me to alleviate that burden from my own load.

What I found was MoreThyme.com, which has now become MealMixer.com. So, today, I thought I would give a quick review of the site for anyone else who's in need of this service to consider.

The Set-up

Meal Mixer is above and beyond the generic one-size-fits-all site. It doesn't simply send out a menu to all its members, regardless of their tastes. Rather, it begins with a short preferences survey asking new members to rate various ingredients on a 5-point scale from "Yuck!" to "Yum!"

After getting your personalized preferences (you can also set your personal dietary needs, such as calorie, fat, and carb intake), the planner asks for a type of meal (pasta, vegetarian, casserole, etc.) that you would like for each meal you want planned. The member has full control over whether she wants just dinners or every meal, including snacks, planned.

The website then prepares a menu. This menu can be tweaked by the member and then printed.

The printed pages include a shopping list, recipes and a week-view menu for hanging on the fridge.

The Good

There are some great qualities that came with my membership to Meal Mixers. Here are my favorite things.

Time Saving

The amount of time I've spent planning good meals with Meal Mixer is minimal. The original set-up took a little bit of time, but once I got the hang of how things worked, I was able to breeze through recipes and have my printed list in about 15-20 minutes for the week. (Keep in mind, this is with a baby in arms. Those of you who are baby-free can whip through the steps much more quickly.)

Variety Inducing

Before using Meal Mixer, my poor family had about 5 meals they could count on week after week. But with the hundreds of recipes on Meal Mixers' site, we have yet to have the same meal twice. So, once again, Billy gets up from the table and tells me something like, "That was fabulous!" Aww...it's just like when we were first married.

Tradition Keeping

Not only does Meal Mixer have tons of new recipes, but it also allows you to enter in your own recipes so you can add your old favorites to your week's plan. The screen to enter these is very intuitive, and the recipes are immediately stored in your personal favorites and dietary information is also available on these.

The Bad

There are also several things lacking with Meal Mixer. Here are a few of the more disappointing features.

Technical Glitches

Recently, MoreThyme.com turned into MealMixer.com. With this change came some new features, but there are still kinks to work out, so some of the selling points of the site actually turn into pretty big annoyances. For example, if a member doesn't like the meal that Meal Mixer chose for her, she can (in theory) ask for "ideas" and all the meals that fit the previously chosen criteria and ingredient survey are supposed to pop up for her to choose from. This doesn't actually happen. When I tried this feature, I got a pop-up window, but it was blank. Also, Meal Mixer did not fill in all the meals I requested. Therefore, we ate cereal for breakfast on Saturday, because I didn't get the cooked meal I asked for.

Incomplete Recipes

Sure there are hundreds of recipes in one location, but many of them are hard to use due to missing information. Today, I went to make a chicken and cheese casserole. I mixed all my ingredients together and realized that I didn't know what size dish to use. I whipped out a 13x9 incher and filled it up. But it didn't actually fill up. The recipe was only large enough for a 9x9. So, I ended up with two dishes to wash. This type of thing is not unusual.

Un-intuitive Interface and Inconvenient Categorizations

This website takes quite a bit of looking around to figure out how to work efficiently with it. Once the basics are learned, it continues to be annoying to move from recipe viewing to the week's grid view. Also, if you would like to move a meal from one day to another, you must keep it as the same meal. So, you can't move French Toast from breakfast on Tuesday to dinner on Wednesday. Day to day moving is allowed, but the meal categories restrict your use of them without using the long-hand procedure of entering meals one recipe at a time.

The Verdict

Despite some of the negatives, mealtime has been much more enjoyable since I've begun using Meal Mixer planning site. Will I renew when I've used my 12 menus? Probably not right away. But I expect that a couple months down the road, we'll be back to our 5 staple meals, and I'll look to sign back up.

WARNING! If you sign up for this service, make sure that you realize that they will continue charging your credit card until you cancel. There is no way to make your membership a manual update, and this is pretty shady, if you ask me.

They have some nice fine print that they'll throw at you to say that they won't refund your money once they take it from you. So, that's annoying, needless to say, but it is there if you look around.

It does seem like a cancellation takes effect at the end of your time period. So, if you "pay" for time you don't want, make the most of it and use up your menus.