bring out your pens

Courges and courgettes, today I am pleased to announce: SHOPPING LISTS ARE BETTER. Now you can have them subtract out what you've got in your pantry so you don't have to spend forever doing editing work!

Now, we all might know about the normal shopping list, where you click and say "add to shopping list" and stuff like that. What you might not know about is that your recipe box holds special shopping lists just for a set of recipes. How does it work? Let's have a little review!

1. Add some recipes to your recipe box - Visit a recipe page, like Beef, Orange and Gorgonzola Sandwiches (which is notable for lacking gorgonzola). Click Save to Recipe Box up by the top. Repeat this for a few other recipes you're thinking of making this week!


2. Visit your recipe box - It's right over here. When you put your mouse over the area by a recipe, you'll notice two things. First, the text next to it turns yellow and highlighted. Click it and then you can add a note to the recipe - I have 'make this vegetarian!!!' by those beef sandwiches. Next, if you go outside of that a little your mouse turns into a four-pointed arrow. Click the mouse and hold it down, and drag the recipe down under 'new list.' Voila! You're starting a new list! After you've dragged your recipes where you want them, click the 'new list' title and rename the area.


3. Get the shopping list! - Under each list there is a button that says "Get a shopping list for...". CLICK IT! You'll see a list of all of the ingredients in the recipe. Snacksby tried hard to add them up correctly, but sometimes it's a little off (like if we don't know how many cups of watermelon is a pound).


4. Get the BETTER shopping list - Have you filled out your pantry yet? It's an easy way to let the site know what you've got on hand so that you don't always have to type it in! Once you've done that, you can click "remove items in your pantry from this list" and Snacksby will draw a line through all of the ingredients you've already got, and if you have 4 carrots in your pantry and you need 6, it will update the list to say you only need 2! INCREDIBLE!!!

Whew! And, of course, if you don't want to go through all of those steps you can always just hit "Add to shopping list" up at the top of any recipe page and it will add the recipe to your main shopping list. But now, basically, you can pick the recipes you'd like to make for a week, and easily go to the grocery store and buy exactly what you need, easily!

So that's the story about what's new. And how did this happen? Because people filled out the survey! If you've got any ideas, just bounce on over there and let us know, and we'll stick them in the on-the-way list!

(Oh, and if you don't like the fact that the ingredients that got removed are just crossed out instead of totally deleted, complain a tiny bit and I'll add in a button to take them off of thet list for you.)

We got mentioned on Lifehacker today by a kind kind user, in response to a story about a service called The Six O'Clock Scramble, where you pay $60/year or so to get shipped a set of menus for the week as well as a shopping list. Sounds keen to me! But can you pick the recipes? Can you plan for vegetarians? Does it know what you've already got lying around? Not so much! I know a lot of you would like to use Snacksby in this way, and that's why I used today to fix up shopping lists. If you have any other ideas that would help us help you, let us know!

(PS: Snacksby's free!)