Newton, MA December 8, 2008 -- Recently released from beta testing, DinnerBeat.com is a website that helps individuals save time and money when planning their meals. Budgeting limited resources for food has always been the toughest challenge that people face, now even more important in these troubling economic times. According to the latest study by the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the average American family spends roughly $820 per month on food. With shrinking family incomes due to lay-offs or pay-cuts, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to cook healthy, inexpensive meals. Statistics prove that planning meals ahead of time is one of the most effective ways to save on food expenditures.

DinnerBeat.com is a free meal planning website that helps users generate menus ahead of time by organizing their recipes and printing shopping lists. The website makes family meal planning almost effortless. Unlike other recipe sites, DinnerBeat.com adds a social aspect by allowing members to add friends, exchange recipes and create and receive recommendations.

Liz Jimenez, a former finance professional turned entrepreneur, created DinnerBeat to assist other busy individuals who disliked making last-minute dinner decisions. Jimenez, a mother of two, decided to get organized using a simple meal planning spreadsheet to help her plan out meals up to weeks in advance. “I knew that other people were also struggling to provide consistent, healthy dinners for their families, so I decided to turn my spreadsheet into a website,” says Jimenez, who coded most of the site herself. “DinnerBeat is a great way to get meal preparations under control, on budget, and to just make planning dinner fun again.”

The website’s tools are simple and easy to use. The Calendar, which is the heart of the system, creates daily, weekly or monthly meal plans. An electronic Recipe Box functions as the keeper of a user’s favorite recipes. Members can also import recipes from their DinnerBeat Friends or from the Internet. When a recipe is added to the Calendar, an ordered Shopping List is automatically created, which can be printed out and brought to the supermarket. The Automate function can be activated at the click of a button. Users who are too busy even to plan individual meals can use this feature and let DinnerBeat arrange menus for them. The system selects dishes from the Recipe Box and places them on the Calendar. All the person has to do is print out the shopping list (which can also be sent to other people) and their meals are set.

“Thanks to DinnerBeat I no longer stress at the end of the work day about what to make for dinner,” raves Kathy, from Nashville. “With just a little effort on my part, my dinners are planned for weeks at a time, my shopping lists are organized, and I can relax knowing that each morning I'll have an email reminder about 'What's For Dinner!'

DinnerBeat is now available to the general public. Interested parties can sign up for free at http://www.dinnerbeat.com.

About DinnerBeat.com:

MIT graduate Liz Jimenez founded DinnerBeat.com in 2007 in Newton, MA, to help people plan and schedule meals through its easy-to-use interface.
A personal project which developed into a public website, DinnerBeat.com quickly grew into a large community of members who use, create and share recipes.

Contact: press@DinnerBeat.com

Labels: Press Release

This is the second year of a new phenomenon in the holiday hype: buy a laptop for a child living in poverty. You can visit the main site here, and purchase through Amazon. There are two choices: you can just purchase one to give for $200, or you can spend $400 and get one for yourself as well. There are mixed reviews (from adult Westerners) about the fit and function of the laptop, but the laptop was not created for them. For a child living in poverty, this most likely will change his or her life. However, this will not only change the lives of children in third world countries, but will also change the lives of our children. Until this point, the ability of Western children to interact with the world's poorest children was limited. Possible, but difficult. Now that these children are online, my children could be interacting with them as frequently and intimately as they could with a cousin on the other side of the country. And there is not a better way to cure materialism and selfishness than to care deeply for someone who has absolutely nothing to their name (except a laptop, of course.) I would love to see them set up a pen-pal system as an addition to the program.

Labels: Thankfulness

You know those toothpicks that come in restaurant sandwiches? The kind with colored cellophane on the top, that you carelessly pull out and plop on the side of your plate? Well, for two-year-olds, they can make the difference between chicken fingers eaten and chicken fingers buried in the applesauce bowl. Next time you cross forks with a stubborn eater, whip out some "flags" and make some "flag chicken." Then tell me how it worked!

Labels: Picky Eater

I recently came across an article from Time magazine called The Magic of the Family Meal.

It highlights some pretty amazing benefits to eating together as a family:

Studies show that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.

Pretty amazing results for such a simple activity! Even though the act of eating as a family sounds simplistic, for some reason, the majority of families don't practice this important ritual daily. Perhaps the ideal of a family meal every day sounds unattainable. It does take organization and foresight to actually make family dinners happen. But family meal planning doesn't have to be overwhelming! DinnerBeat not only provides the framework to make family meal planning a breeze, it also provides meal ideas, a way to dialog with friends about their meals, an automatically-generated shopping list, and will even schedule your main dishes for you.

My family and I are committed to eating family meals together every day. I'm sure there will be more struggles as my 2 1/2-year-old and 9-month-old grow, but at least now that I have DinnerBeat, I am no longer overwhelmed by the thought of family meal planning.

Labels: Family Meal Planning

There have been a few major updates to the site over the last few days! Here are a few of the highlights:

*DinnerBeat can now schedule your meals for you! When you first log in, there will be a sentence in the middle of the page:

Automatically schedule your main dishes for the next _ days.

You just fill in the number of day, and click Go!

Dishes will be scheduled randomly, based on their rating. For example, a dish with five stars will be five times more likely to appear than a dish with one star. Dishes without a rating are equivalent to dishes with one star.

*We have a new FAQs page. If there are any questions you have, or have had, let me know and we will add them to the list. This can be seen through the links at the bottom of the page.

*You can now email your recipes to your friends, even friends that are not part of DinnerBeat. Click on the link at the bottom of the recipe and you will be taken to an email screen where you can customize the wording. The email will contain a link to an organized, printable recipe.

And, of course, this blog that you have already discovered.

Labels: Updates

Kudos to StatCounter Blog for this insightful post giving an alternative view on the credit crisis and for all the other posts on poverty due to Blog Action Day 2008. As we gather around our tables tonight, let's be thankful for what we do have: a place to eat, pots to cook with, heat in our house, and food to put in our stomachs.

Labels: Thankfulness

Katie has recently decided that she doesn't want to eat green peppers. She has gotten very good at identifying peppers wherever they are in our food. I made my favorite dish today, chili, which absolutely requires green peppers.

I successfully got her to eat them!

Here's how: I put them in my food chopper, a la the Sneaky Chef. I didn't liquefy them completely, but they were pretty small pieces. I thought I had lost when I set it in front of her and she quickly and correctly identified them. First I tried to convince her that it was green meat (you never know what might work on a two-year-old), but she looked at me like I had lost my head. She finally tasted it when I told her I had chopped it up so small that she wouldn't be able to taste it. And she ate almost an entire bowl. Score!

Labels: Picky Eater