Eating.  We all have to do it every day (more or less – occasional fasting days excepted).  But it can be a lot of trouble to get to that point, right?  I mean, someone has to prepare the food before it can be eaten.  For most of my readers, that somebody in your house is you.

I don’t know about you, but this is not my favorite task.  It’s one that I do because it has to get done, so the more streamlined I can make the process, the better.  I’ve previously written a post outlining, step-by-step, how I prepare my menus.  Since you can just read that, I won’t go over it all again.  The biggest key for me, though, in simplifying it is having on hand a list of meals I know are options.

Sometimes circumstances throw a wrench in things and that list no longer works well.  In those cases, or during periods when time is limited and you just need a little help, it can be beneficial to have someone else do the planning for you.  In my case, going gluten-free has been something of a hassle.  I know there is plenty of stuff I can eat, but when I need to prepare a menu, I just draw a blank.  That’s where The Fresh 20 comes in.

The Fresh 20 is a menu planning service.  Each week, members have access to a new menu, with a grocery list, prep. list, and recipes for preparing five weekday meals.  Unlike previously-available menu planning services, though, The Fresh 20 uses real food – nothing is processed.  (There are breads and pastas and such in some of the recipes, but nothing like cream-of-whatever soup or jarred alfredo sauce.)  The idea is to use 20 fresh ingredients each week (along with some pantry staples) to create the meals.

They have gluten-free and vegetarian plans, which was exciting for me.  How much easier to transition to a gluten-free menu if someone else is feeding me recipes (figuratively speaking) that I can eat!  No weeding through a long list of “can’t-eat-this” recipes just get to a few that I can, getting more and more discouraged in the process.  No more having to alter practically everything before I can prepare it.

So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with the plans.  The grocery lists include estimated costs, and they seem to me to be fairly accurate.  (So they aren’t saying that you can cook meals for $xx per week, but then you find out later that there’s no way you can actually purchase the ingredients for that.)  The produce used is seasonal, so you probably won’t get much better pricing on it (unless you grow it in your garden, in which case you should save a lot!).  However, the meat does not take into consideration sales, because it’s not locale-specific.  This means that if you’re comfortable with using frozen meat, you could potentially save a lot by buying ahead on sale and having it on hand.

The best way to do this (in my opinion) is to go for their annual plan.  The menus aren’t much more than $1/week, but they’re actually even a little less expensive if you purchase a year at a time.  If you get the annual plan, you also get access to their archives – which means you could choose whichever older menus utilize the meat you currently have in your freezer.

We don’t eat pork or shellfish, so there have been a few recipes we wouldn’t eat, but at least one of the pork ones had substitution options listed.  All in all, I think this is a great service and I will be subscribing to the annual plan as soon as funds allow.

In short, there are steps you can take to make meal planning much easier.  But for meal planning made really easy, just let someone else do it. 😉

Disclosure: The Fresh 20 provided me with a free account for one month to facilitate this review  All opinions are purely my own – and I really will be subscribing to the service myself!