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We all know that preparing dinner at home is cheaper and better for you than getting takeaway every night. But planning each meal, and shopping for ingredients, is pretty time-consuming. And if you’re like me you’re unlikely to take the recipe book with you to the supermarket so most of the time you end up either lacking one or two vital ingredients, or with far too much of something else. Conversely you could sit down and plan your meals and your shopping list carefully each week/fortnight/insert time period here, or go shopping every 10 minutes, or you could use the service at Mealopedia instead.

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Mealopedia is like most other recipe databases, in that you can search for recipes by keyword or ingredient, but Mealopedia includes an online menu planner with a difference – it goes one crucial step further to offer you a shopping list for the entire menu so you can do all that tedious shopping in one go.

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You can either ask for a random weekly menu or design your own based on their recipe database. Then tweak each day’s meals by ingredient or style, print your recipes and for the finishing touch, print or send yourself (by email or SMS) a shopping list for the week’s menu. You end up with a lovely itemised list of ingredients, sorted by type e.g. deli, fruit, vegetables, meat, which means that when you go shopping you won’t miss anything or end up with the wrong quantities.

If that wasn’t enough there are also beverage and meal matching tips, metric/imperial conversions on each recipe, and�a useful glossary for looking up oddly-named foodstuffs. No registration required, but if you sign up for a free account you get the email and SMS features and the ability to save notes for the recipes you love. It’s brilliant!

Mealopedia is a fresh, innovative way of deciding what to cook for dinner tonight. Our mission is to making every person worldwide who dares open their kitchen cupboard confident to create new, healthy meals without the hassle of planning ahead! Mealopedia allows you to forget the frustration of deciding what to cook, forget complicated methods and mixtures but most of all not forget any ingredients on the way home from the supermarket! Your new kitchen assistant uses a unique and intuitive shopping list to add together all your required ingredients.

Tags: freeware, online+menu+planner, online+meal+planner, recipe+database, online+shopping+list+maker