[00:00:00] 

I'm Riley and I'm Roni. And this is the plan to eat podcast, where we have conversations about meal planning, food, and wellness. To help you answer the question what's for dinner.

Roni: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another feature Friday episode on the Plan to Eat podcast. 

Riley: Today, we are talking to you about menus on the meal planner. A menus are a collection of planned items that can be added to your planner. Just like a recipe, just dragged and dropped onto your planner.

Roni: Yeah. So you can plan recipes, ingredients, notes, anything that you would normally put on your planner, they can be saved so that you can use them again in the future. So one of the great things that you can do with this is like you made, you know, like a weekly or a monthly meal plan. And it was just a real banger of a meal plan and everybody loved the recipes, or it saved you a lot of money or, you know, whatever, the awesome thing that was about it, you can go and you can save that menu and you can then reuse it again in the future as many times as you want.

We [00:01:00] also love to use this for like a special holiday menu or like a birthday menu, something like that. So if whenever, like special occasions come around, there are specific recipes that you always cook. You can make a menu for those. And then when that special occasion comes around, you can just quickly add the menu to your meal planner. rather than sifting through your recipe book and finding all those recipes individually. 

Riley: Uh, you can make a menu for one meal or you can make it up to the length of a whole month. Um, so it's really versatile in that. It could be something really brief, like Roni just said like one day of recipes that you want to have for Thanksgiving or something like that, or it could be a whole month where you are just being a meal planning pro and planning your whole month out. So that you don't have to think about it again every week.

Roni: So on the desktop website, you find the menus. When you are in your meal planner, there is a menus button in the upper right corner, next to all of your other little options that are on the meal planner. And then when you're on the app, when you're on the plan tab, there is also a menu link kind of in the upper right corner.

It says menu. So you can tap on that, [00:02:00] opens your menu options there. Basically you can go in and you can add all of your recipes, notes, ingredients, all of those kinds of things. You can give it a different name. You can apply tags to it, and you can also make your menus private, just like you can with your recipes. so you can toggle that lock icon to make them private, because if you don't toggle it to private, all of your friends in Plan to Eat can see your menus.

Can be a great thing. But if you have like a special menu for special occasion or something, or recipes in that menu that you don't necessarily want to share with other people, um, you would want to go and toggle that to private.

Riley: Um, so when you create a menu, it doesn't matter what dates you planned those recipes or ingredients or notes or anything like that. The menus are kind of outside of a specific date range. So if you start your menu on a Monday, you don't have to plan that menu on a Monday. You could plan that menu starting on a Friday.

So it's really versatile. It's not connected to a specific set of dates. It's just created within a date range. So maybe you planned for five days or one day.[00:03:00] It's, it's more related to those, the number of days and not the specific dates that you planned. It.

Roni: So one of my favorite ways to use Menus is to basically create a meal planning template with your menus. So you add recipe notes in. To your meal planner that are things that you just plan on a normal basis. So It. could be like every day you eat, you have a breakfast smoothie, or you like to have a salad for lunch. Um, every Friday you want to have takeout or you go to your parents' house for dinner, any of those kinds of things that happen on a consistent basis, you can add those into a menu. And then when you go to create your meal plan, you just start by putting that menu on your meal planner and then fill in all the extra space.

You can also use this for, um, if you're somebody who likes to have like themes on different days of the week. So you like to have your taco Tuesday and your, uh, fishy Thursday, which I don't know if anybody does that, but. 

Riley: Meatless Monday.

Roni: Monday, you could have any of those things. And so you could put a note with [00:04:00] those reminders in there of like, this is the type of recipe that we like to have on Mondays, Olivia, to have a meatless recipe.

We like to have a taco recipe on Tuesdays. So It kind of is in there just as a little note for a reminder of the types of themes that you like to follow,

Riley: adds it as sorry. 

Roni: oh, go ahead. 

Riley: No I did. I was just going to say that it's like a little prompt. So when you drag it to your meal plan, you're prompted of like, oh, I need to look for this kind of recipe. So if you struggle with, you know, like meal planning paralysis, and you don't know what to plan, creating yourself a little prompt, menu could actually really help you get the job done fast.

Roni: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so with these template type menus, I either like to put template in the title of the menu, or I like to tag it with the tag, um, template or something like that. So then we, you can quickly find it so that when you're starting your meal planning, it's just the first thing that you had to your meal planner. 

Riley: Menus are awesome. And they're really helpful. Um, if you're somebody who, is just really trying to, uh, I don't know, make this whole process. Faster and easier for yourself. I highly recommend menus. You can actually [00:05:00] save menus from weeks from the past. So you can go in and create a new menu. When you're on the desktop site, you can go in and save a meal plan you've already created.

You can use this feature in both the app and the desktop site, but if you're making a menu from something you planned in the past, like Roni said a banger of a meal plan, and it was just a great week. You can go in and save that. Um, so again, just kind of saving yourself time, making it a little bit easier for yourself. 

Roni: well, we hope that you learned a little bit about the menus feature. Thank you so much for listening to another feature Friday, and we'll catch you guys in the next episode.