Disclaimer: What follows is my review of Cook Smarts, which Lauryn and I have been using since November, 2016. None of the links in this post are referral links for the service, and I am certainly not being paid for this review. I just love the service and want to share it with everyone I know. 🙂
One of the biggest struggles Lauryn and I would face on a weekly basis is a rather simple question: “What should we eat next week?” Every now and then, we’d come up with a plan of a few meals we could make, and even rarely would we actually keep to everything. Most of the things we cooked made 6-8 servings, meaning we’d be eating the same few things all week. We’d also struggle with things to pack in our lunches: alternating between leftovers, salads, sandwiches, and trying to figure out something we could prep ahead of time to take all week. For the last few months, we have been using a service called Cook Smarts, and things have been much simpler.
The Service
CookSmarts is a meal planning service that sends you recipes in your e-mail every week. Every Thursday, Lauryn and I get an e-mail four recipes for us to make the next week. Each recipe can be adjusting to fit any number of servings and can fit certain dietary guidelines (gluten-free, paleo, vegetarian). If you don’t think you’ll be interested in one of the meals or if you want to prepare more than just the four you were sent, you can select any of their other meals from previous meal plans. The service creates a grocery list containing all of the ingredients for your meals, making shopping relatively easy. Each recipe includes full nutritional information, Weight Watchers points, and can be synced with a MyFitnessPal account.
The Meals
The meals so far have been awesome, mostly. A few things have been somewhat bland, but that’s probably to be expected with a service that is at least trying to give you healthy meals. You can bookmark meals as “Favorites” so that you can easily reference meals later. You aren’t able to exclude recipes that require certain ingredients (such as fish), but we have done well by simply making substitutions for things we do like eating. We’ve been using the program for several weeks now, and have been amazed at the variety of meals we have seen. We’ve certainly tried a few new foods that we had never cooked before (kale, quinoa, polenta), which has been mostly successful. Meals typically take <40 minutes to cook, which is awesome. The site does list out things you can prep ahead of time, but we haven’t taken advantage of this yet. There are several times where one recipe will have you make something that another recipe later in the week will also use, which is a huge help.
The Catch
The service costs $6-$8 per month, depending on how long of a membership you purchase. It might seem silly to pay for recipes, but if this saves you from eating out a couple times over the course of a year, then it will pay for itself rather quickly. Picky eaters may also have some troubles with this service, but it does allow you to dig through their archived recipes to find things you would like to eat. The recipes tend to use many of the same ingredients (oils, vinegars, spices, etc) week to week, but there are a few items here and there that recipes called for that are used somewhat less frequently (curry paste, miso).
The Verdict
Lauryn and I went to Albuquerque for New Years Eve. We came home on Sunday night, with me having to work on Monday. Within an hour of coming home, we had sat our stuff down, logged in to Cook Smarts, printed off our grocery list, and were on our way to the store. Had we not been using this service, we probably would have spent all week trying to figure out meals, and likely would have eaten out a couple of times. We don’t even think about what meals we are going to make now, which has been absolutely incredible. I would definitely recommend Cook Smarts to anybody who struggles with figuring out what to eat for a given week. It has certainly made our lives a lot easier.
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