“What do you want to eat this week?”
Are you filled with the same dread that I am when you hear that question? Whether its analysis paralysis or an inability to settle, planning meals is one of the most annoying tasks. It’s funny, because our ancestors who had far less options and opportunities than even the least of our supermarkets offer, had it harder… so why do we struggle with making that list and simply deciding what is on the week’s menu?
Countless diets, countless recipes, and countless suggestions exist. You may have your family cookbook, but you may also have a sporadic random assortment of online recipes from recipe blogs. It’s a cluttered mess and may not always represent what you choose to eat consistently. This is problem 1. Problem 2 is that even if you have some semblance of order for your favorite recipes, constantly writing down the different items you need that week on the shopping list takes up too much time. Let’s not even get into if you forget to write something on the list… because we all know, If it isn’t on the list, it isn’t getting bought.
Problem 1: Recipe Chaos
To solve the recipe chaos problem, an application needs a clean, simple way to store your recipes. In LMRK, or the List Management and Recipe Keeper application, this is accomplished by defining a recipe as ingredients and instructions on a recipe card. Since you probably have a huge collection of recipes, LMRK also helps organize your recipes into meal types, allows custom tags so you can separate recipes into your own categories, and color coding to make the cards easy to understand in your own way. LMRK Removes recipe chaos by centralizing your recipes in one place and making them beyond easy to search through and find what you want.
Problem 2: Repetitive List Generation
The problem with lists as you are probably used to doing them is that they take a silly amount of time to type everything in. Most note apps, even the fancy ones with the checklists, don’t take well to copy-pasting from a bunch of sources, as these may insert extra detail you don’t need, or are formatted in a way that breaks your list. In other words, no matter what you do, there’s no easy way to get all your items on the list in a way that doesn’t waste any time.
LMRK solves this problem by connecting your recipe book directly to your shopping list. All you do is select the list you want to be set as active, and then from the recipe book, you can click a button on a recipe to send it to the shopping list. This automatically adds each item from that recipe to the list. In as little as 3 clicks, you have every item for 3 meals – much faster than typing everything in, wouldn’t you say?
The Full Meal Planning Solution
LMRK Started as a very simple idea I had in school. I wanted to make a recipe application that would also make it easier for me to shop for the recipes I was cooking. I actually had the opportunity to work on two different iterations of that idea on separate projects. Now, LMRK is the culmination of what I learned, tailored to the main goal: Make meal planning easier. To do this, LMRK aims to reduce friction during the planning step and get you to the store faster.
Try LMRK Today! Experience the future of meal planning and recipe management at www.listandrecipe.com. Organize your recipes, automate your shopping lists, and simplify your weekly meal prep.
Future updates include: • fully functional meal planner, with a single “Send all planned recipes to the shopping list” button • Alternate list views, that let you examine the list by recipe, or drag and drop items into different store “departments” or “aisles”. • Recipe step-through mode, that shows your recipe step by step, with a big button to go to next or go back to previous step. • UI cleanup, making it easier to get to the “Family Share” mode.
