Do you use menu planning websites?

[Fat Guy]

A mother at my son's school told me yesterday that she uses a menu-planning website, in her case http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com/ , to plan the week's meals and shopping list -- and that she's saving about $100 a week on groceries while getting better feedback on meals from her family. Googling around I see there's a whole world of these menu-planning websites.

Does anybody here use one of them and/or have an opinion about the phenomenon?

[Lisa Shock]

MasterCook software has had features like this for years. It comes with recipes, and you can input your own, and it generates shopping lists. It will also show the nutritional values of the recipes so you can make sure you're serving healthy foods.

I guess sites like that are ok for people who don't know much about cooking and never had a Home Ec class.

[JAZ]

I've seen one called E-mealz which has different plans for different grocery store chains (I assume to take advantage of sales), various diets (the "portion control" plan is pretty popular with Weight Watchers members, apparently) and families or couples. I think the sample menus sound pretty wretched, but as Lisa mentioned, for someone unfamiliar with menu planning and cooking, it might prove useful.

[Allura]

I've used two different ones off and on, www.savingdinner.com and www.dinnerselect.com . Neither is going to get you fancy food, and I think the saving dinner meals are much faster to get done, but I don't like the format as much as I liked the dinner select format. I'm back on a low-carb diet, though, so I may go bakc to using saving dinner again, because they have a separate low carb option.