This app just changed my life... or at least my meal plan

I have been sitting at my computer for the past hour blurting out phrases like, "I don't believe this." "No way." "I love this." "You have to be kidding."

What's all the fuss? Well, if you know me then you can probably guess it has to do with my unnatural obsession with meal planning.

I don't know WHY with all of the blog posts I have written about meal planning I didn't think of this sooner: "There MUST be an app for that!"

So, I went online this morning and found the meal-planning app that has become my Saturday morning obsession. I hope it turns out to be as fabulous as I think it is so far.

It's called MacGourmet and let me tell you a few things that it does. Like many of the popular recipe web sites, you can store all of your favorite recipes and create shopping lists from them. But this also features an optional plug-in that allows you to drag and drop the recipes you plan to use each week into a meal planner.

You can easily import recipes from web sites like allrecipes.com with just a couple of clicks. Then you drag them into your calendar to plan your meals. You can print out a list of that week's meals, print a shopping list, sync with your iPhone and even upload to your iCal.

I decided last week that I wanted to create a meal plan with 30 days of crock pot recipes. I'm so tired of scrambling to make dinner every afternoon. So, I just spent the last hour choosing crock pot recipes and soup recipes from allrecipes.com and importing them into MacGourmet.

All you have to do is highlight the URL and use an option in your menu bar to import the full recipe, including instructions, photos and notes. It works with about five of the major recipe web sites.

Say it with me: "I can't believe it!" "This is awesome!"

The bad news is that it costs $30, and the meal planner plug-in is an extra $10. But considering I had just asked my husband to buy me a crock pot cookbook for Christmas, I am thinking this would be a much better gift. The application has a trial period that allows you to test it for free for about a month. (Dear MacGourmet, if you would like to give me a free copy of your software I would be happy to be your spokesperson.)

I have tried other apps like Dinner Spinner (from allrecipes) and the recipe and shopping list app from Epicurious. But this is the first one I found that allows me to create meal plans and send them to my iCal to remind me what I am planning for that day.

So what do you think? Does anyone else already have an app they use for meal planning? Is anyone else even one-eighth as excited about this as I am? How about one-sixteenth? One-thirty-second?? Anyone?

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