Grocery Lists and Meal Planning Made Easy

In my attempts to save money, meal planning and grocery shopping has become more complex. I’m clipping coupons, shopping multiple stores to get the best prices, and planning meals around what’s on sale. Being domestically and organizationally challenged, this new way of cooking and shopping has been difficult for me to manage.

But I’ve just come across a great new web and phone app that can make it easier. Ziplist offers lots of great features to create a shopping list and plan meals. The shopping list can be organized by aisle or store. It can be shared with other members of the family so that they can add items.

Not sure what to make for dinner? Ziplist has tons of recipes and with a single click all the ingredients can be added to your list. It will even show you items that you may already have at home so that they aren’t added to the list. And if you find a recipe on another website, you can save it to your Ziplist recipe box.

When you’re ready to shop, you can print out your list or access it by through your SmartPhone (iPhone app coming soon).

To learn more or to create your own list, visit Ziplist.

Get Cooking Tips from Top Chefs

“If your food and wine adventures are more about the journey than the destination, Behind the Burner is the perfect place to explore your culinary desires.” From BehindTheBurner.

BehindtheBurner.com offers advice, tricks and secrets from the country’s top chefs. Learn about the chefs’ and restaurateurs, watch videos of chef’s cooking signature foods (I liked the chocolate french toast by Chef Peyard – Chocolate Epiphany), and read articles on everything from wine and travel, to how-to and health. Plus you can get great recipes.

If cooking (and eating) is your life, be sure to visit BehindtheBurner.com.

Kid Safe Search Engine – KidRex

Several years ago my daughter was online searching the web for pictures of kittens. Apparently our kid-safe protocols weren’t set and she ended up finding sites that didn’t have kittens in the feline sense of the word. After getting over the shock and resetting the parent controls, we felt better, but still wondered what kinds of other searches would result in questionnable content. With all the tricks that some web people use to dupe search engines and secure protocols, we couldn’t trust that our kids were 100% safe.

Recently I discovered KidRex a kid-safe search engine. Using Google’s Custom Search and Safe Search, as well as checking sites against its own database of inappropriate sites, KidRex strives to offer kids a safe place to find information on the Internet. KidRex says that it filters to remove sexual content, but it doesn’t indicate if it also screens for violence, hate, etc. It admits that the engine isn’t 100% safe as some sites may slip through the filters. To that end it provides a way to submit information about inappropriate sites to its database for future exclusion.

The search page is much like Google’s in that there is very little but the search box on the page. With a crayon picture of a dinosaur its geared towards young children. Because of that and because filters aren’t 100%, parents will still want to screen what their children are finding online. But its a good starting point to keeping children safe from inappropriate material.

To learn more visit KidRex.com