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Still too much work! How about you give me a list of meals, I pick 50 or 100 of them, and then you give me a shopping list for the month including where to get

Still too much work! How about you give me a list of meals, I pick 50 or 100 of them, and then you give me a shopping list for the month including where to get it at the best price, taking advantage of bulk purchasing and overlapping ingredients. Then email/text/notify me every day with the recipe for dinner that night. I'll keep the left overs and use them for lunches. This should minimize time for planning and cost of meals, two things Blue Apron largely fails to do. It'd also be nice if I could get a further notification asking me how long it took me to prepare, so the service can get an idea for how long it takes me to cook and help me plan dinners accordingly - maybe giving me faster alternative alongside the normal dinner plan.

_thejrk 8y ago
As a single father who sucks at everything kitchen.. i need dis.
- motivated_gear 8y ago
  If the blue apron team doesn't read threads like these and actually build things people want, they're finished. They spent so much on advertising and promotions without improving their product offering.
- ams6110 8y ago
  No you don't. As a single parent you don't have time, and kids don't appreciate and in fact often don't like elaborate or gourmet food. Learn to make half-a-dozen simple dishes from memory. Pasta with meat sauce. Simple dishes with chicken, pork, fish, or beef, and vegetables. Stuff you can throw together with basic staple ingredients, minimal prep work, and minimal utensils. This makes shopping easier and minimizes time to prepare meals. Avoid kitchen gadgets. They are just an extra thing to clean and you'll rarely use them. Have a few good knives, a couple of cutting/prep boards, and a basic set of pots and pans and utensils and stick to recipies that work with that.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    > Avoid kitchen gadgets. May I nominate one exception: a pressure cooker. This includes plug-in electric like the Breville Fast Slow Cooker. If you are able to chop carrots, you can make endless variety of stews, casseroles, soups and curries with straightforward recipes, minimal complexity, short cook times and not too much cleaning up afterwards. And they're the sort of dishes that make great leftovers.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
paulgb 8y ago
Aside from the optimizing-where-to-buy part, this sounds like what https://mealime.com https://mealime.com is attempting to do. I've only used it for one meal so far so but if you select multiple meals it creates a combined shopping list.
superfrank 8y ago
I came across platejoy (platejoy.com) a couple months ago while looking for a meal plan that would work around my food allergies and it check most of the boxes of what you are asking for. The planning is week by week, and it doesn't have a best price thing, but it does pretty much everything else (recepies in app, you can tell it ahead of time you prefer to eat leftovers for lunch, each recipe has a prepare & cook time and asks for feed back). Also, it can send all the ingredient to Instacart in a single click, if that's your thing. It's really changed the way I eat. I went from eating out for lunch and dinner almost every day, to cooking at home pretty much every night.
paulcole 8y ago
Still too much work! Just come to my apartment and feed me like a baby bird.
- bm1362 8y ago
  For $30 dollars/day, you _can_ find someone to spend 3x15 minutes vomiting into your mouth.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    Check out my new VAAS startup (YC19).
    - parthdesai 8y ago
      Does it have machine learning and is it on block-chain?
      - paulcole 8y ago
        Best of all I only advertise through podcast ads and Medium posts about what I learned by blowing $50k on podcast ads.
thisone 8y ago
I once had a cookbook named 'once a month cooking' https://www.amazon.com/Once-Month-Cooking-Revised-Delicious/dp/0312243189 https://www.amazon.com/Once-Month-Cooking-Revised-Delicious/... Everything was laid out for you, what to buy, the order to prep and cook, and in one weekend you'd have everything ready for a month's worth of meals

_thejrk 8y ago

As a single father who sucks at everything kitchen.. i need dis.

motivated_gear 8y ago
If the blue apron team doesn't read threads like these and actually build things people want, they're finished. They spent so much on advertising and promotions without improving their product offering.
ams6110 8y ago
No you don't. As a single parent you don't have time, and kids don't appreciate and in fact often don't like elaborate or gourmet food. Learn to make half-a-dozen simple dishes from memory. Pasta with meat sauce. Simple dishes with chicken, pork, fish, or beef, and vegetables. Stuff you can throw together with basic staple ingredients, minimal prep work, and minimal utensils. This makes shopping easier and minimizes time to prepare meals. Avoid kitchen gadgets. They are just an extra thing to clean and you'll rarely use them. Have a few good knives, a couple of cutting/prep boards, and a basic set of pots and pans and utensils and stick to recipies that work with that.
- sjwright 8y ago
  > Avoid kitchen gadgets. May I nominate one exception: a pressure cooker. This includes plug-in electric like the Breville Fast Slow Cooker. If you are able to chop carrots, you can make endless variety of stews, casseroles, soups and curries with straightforward recipes, minimal complexity, short cook times and not too much cleaning up afterwards. And they're the sort of dishes that make great leftovers.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

paulgb 8y ago

Aside from the optimizing-where-to-buy part, this sounds like what https://mealime.com https://mealime.com is attempting to do. I've only used it for one meal so far so but if you select multiple meals it creates a combined shopping list.

superfrank 8y ago

I came across platejoy (platejoy.com) a couple months ago while looking for a meal plan that would work around my food allergies and it check most of the boxes of what you are asking for. The planning is week by week, and it doesn't have a best price thing, but it does pretty much everything else (recepies in app, you can tell it ahead of time you prefer to eat leftovers for lunch, each recipe has a prepare & cook time and asks for feed back). Also, it can send all the ingredient to Instacart in a single click, if that's your thing. It's really changed the way I eat. I went from eating out for lunch and dinner almost every day, to cooking at home pretty much every night.

paulcole 8y ago

Still too much work! Just come to my apartment and feed me like a baby bird.

bm1362 8y ago
For $30 dollars/day, you _can_ find someone to spend 3x15 minutes vomiting into your mouth.
- paulcole 8y ago
  Check out my new VAAS startup (YC19).
  - parthdesai 8y ago
    Does it have machine learning and is it on block-chain?
    - paulcole 8y ago
      Best of all I only advertise through podcast ads and Medium posts about what I learned by blowing $50k on podcast ads.

thisone 8y ago

I once had a cookbook named 'once a month cooking' https://www.amazon.com/Once-Month-Cooking-Revised-Delicious/dp/0312243189 https://www.amazon.com/Once-Month-Cooking-Revised-Delicious/... Everything was laid out for you, what to buy, the order to prep and cook, and in one weekend you'd have everything ready for a month's worth of meals