SOS Cuisine

The Food Value section on my sidebar has a new link: SOS Cuisine, a service that helps you plan one week's shopping and cooking for weeknight dinners. When I lived in Canada I used to spend an hour or so each week going to the websites of our local grocery chains to see what was on special, scrolling through multi page pdf documents and thinking that some central website should be doing this for me. SOS Cuisine does even more, planning a menu complete with prep time and nutrition information and calculating the cost for the number of people for whom you cook. You can choose menu preferences such as budget, low calorie, and exclude certain foods. The site tracks what is on special at local supermarkets and chooses what recipes would be most economical to make each week. The weekly meal plans that I've seen so far are based on an hour or so advance prep time, and then when mealtime comes around it is usually twenty minutes or less to get dinner on the table.

It's not perfect - the local specials information is based where the service originated (Quebec), and most of the users are francophones. So even though there is a complete English version of the website, it's tough for the French challenged to benefit from the recipe reviews. However, even if you are not local the sample menu plans and recipes are valuable for their own sake. Most 'health and budget' meal plan recipes are stodgy and unappealing, calculated to satisfy health requirements rather than provide pleasure, but the recipes on SOS Cuisine read like something you actually want to make. The service is also FREE.