We have been very busy here at The Food Lovers Kitchen over the last 6 weeks, working on new features to make the site more useful to everyone. After the initial site debut on March 6th, we turned our attention to creating some truly useful, interactive site tools that help make meal planning and shopping a breeze for anyone. We are so excited to introduce you to My Kitchen – your personal space – a place where you can save your favorite recipes, plan your meals and create shopping lists with ease. The latest wave of site features are geared towards providing a seamless user experience that makes paleo meal planning and ingredient shopping a snap. To access My Kitchen, please take a few seconds to register. It’s free, and only requires your email and selecting a user name.

Add Recipes to “My Kitchen”

Add from our database of over 300 (and counting) gluten-free recipes to “My Kitchen” with the click of a button. Each time you login, the recipes saved in My Kitchen will be there waiting for you, categorized by type for easy navigation.

Create Shopping List

From your selected recipes you can create a shopping list by simply adding the recipes to the middle column and a shopping list will be generated for you, categorized by ingredient type for easy sourcing. You can add or delete recipes at the click of a button. If you’d like, you can also delete ingredients from the final shopping list if you already have them. If everything is in place, simply click print (or email it to your smart phone) and you’re ready to go to the grocery store! You can also save your shopping list for future use if you wish. We’re working on the ability to save multiple lists, so hang tight on that one.

Add and Save Personal Recipe Notes

Now, with our new “Add Notes” feature, you can save little snippets of information on how our recipes work best in your kitchen. Maybe you cut the sweetener for something in half. Maybe you doubled it. All you need is to login, write a note, click save – and the note will be waiting for you next time you visit the recipe, whether that is next week, next month, or next year.

Other site updates and new features:

• Better search functionality: Type in your search terms, and filter by recipe or post. Flip back and forth if you don’t find what you’re looking for.
• Improved recipe layout: We’ve created logical clusters of buttons, information, and action items. Everything is easier to find and easier for you to use.
• Rate recipes: Now you can leave a 1-5 star rating along with your recipe review. Your ratings will help other users find the best recipes, and help us improve the ones that fall short.
• Streamlined login / logout function: We’ve cleaned up the login/logout function. We know it’s not very sexy, but the small stuff is still important!
• Find recipes that use similar ingredients: Click on any ingredient within a recipe, and see a list of which of our other recipes use that ingredient.
• SpreadShirt Shop improvements: We now have our shirts fully integrated into the site. Many prices have been discounted, and we also opened up an EU store for our friends in Europe!

If you feel like your experience here is worth something, Become a Supporting Member

We created The Food Lovers Kitchen to provide a premier online resource and toolkit for the Paleo and gluten-free community. Our intent from the very beginning has been to make (and keep) this site free for the public to use. This means that every person gets to use the same tools we’ve provided: My Kitchen, special dietary filters, meal plans, nutritional information, and inspired menu ideas. The best things in life are free, however The Food Lovers Kitchen was not free for us to create (not by a long shot, actually). The project has already involved hundreds of our own hours, and hundreds of hours from our web development team.

Your Supporting Membership drives our ongoing investment in the development of new and useful tools for the community, website improvements and support.

Here are some future website improvements we’re hoping to fund:

• Interactive Meal and Menu Planner
• Advanced ingredient sourcing to help you find special ingredients
• Online collaboration with other members
• Ability to upload your own recipes and share them with others

Thank you all for your continued support and enthusiasm. We’re very excited to keep bringing you new features that make the Paleo lifestyle easier and better for everyone.

-Bill & Hayley