Menu Planning with Relay Foods

Have you ever tried Relay Foods? I had heard of the service but until recently never given it a try. Relay Foods is an online grocery store offering local, organic and natural foods with pick up locations in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area; eight Virginia cities and towns (Charlottesville, Richmond, Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Stafford); Annapolis and Baltimore, MD; and North Carolina's Research Triangle. They not only have food products but also cleaning supplies, baby items, beer, wine, health and beauty.

Relay Foods also offers a meal planning feature where you can search for recipes, select one and  quickly add the ingredients to your cart for the week. Or you can create a dish and add your own recipe or a recipe from another site. Relay Foods reached out to me and asked if I wanted to try their meal planning feature for a week. I went on the site and browsed recipes and found three that sounded delicious. I quickly added all those ingredients to my cart. I also added two of my own recipes, one was from a food blog and I was able to quick cut and pasted the ingredients into this page. The other was from myrecipes.com - this recipe was very easy to add by simply cut and pasting the link into the create a dish page and all the ingredients as well as instructions were added. The Relay Foods website will also save these recipes so you can use them again in the future. It reminds me of a Pinterest recipe page only with the added bonus of ordering the ingredients direct from the site. They also have a Cook It bookmarklet you can to your toolbar and very easily click and add recipes directly to relay from most sites.

I placed my order late Friday afternoon and picked up my groceries at the Walgreens at Three Chopt and Parham at 4 pm on Monday.

My greeter was so friendly and it was very quick and easy to secure my groceries.

After putting everything away at home, it was time to start cooking. I received an email that had all my meals for the week along with directions for cooking. I printed this out and referred to it all week long.

First up was Smothered Steak and Chili Burritos. This recipe was yummy! It called for some very specific ingredients such as Ethiopian Berbere Spice but using Relay Foods it was easy to purchase a small portion of this spice.

On Tuesday night Camille has gymnastics until 5:30 pm, I wanted something quick so I selected the Teriyaki Salmon Bowl. I marinated the salmon, chopped all the veggies, pulled out and staged all my pans prior to gymnastics. When I got home, it was very easy to complete the meal and it turned out delicious. I will definitely be making this one again.

On Wednesday, we went with Great White Pizza from Today's Parent. I couldn't directly add this link to the Relay Foods site however it was super easy to just cut and paste from one site to the other. We also had a Mixed Green Salad...I use this recipe from Tyler Florence.

Thursday morning, I prepped Crock-pot Zuppa Toscana. Everything went into the crockpot for 7-8 hours and then I added kale, milk and cream at the end of the day. I also served this also with delicious sour dough bread from Relay Foods.

I was very pleased with the quality of all the ingredients we used throughout the week. I liked that I was able to secure some unique ingredients such as Italian Arrabiatta Sausage and the Ethiopian Berbere Spice as well as local vegetables and pasta. We requested some peanut butter blossom cookies that were not available for Monday pickup but the Relay Foods Customer Happiness Team substituted for me with peanut butter cookies from Montana Gold. They provide the substitutes at pick up and you are not required to take them but I am glad we did because they were great.

I have been working this weekend so we didn't get to our last meal of Grilled Chicken Florentine Pasta but that is on the menu for tonight. I added this recipe very easily to the Relay Foods site just by cut and pasting the link.

Relay Foods is offering a coupon code to my readers and all new customers. If you are a new customer, you can receive $30 off your first order of $50 or more. Such a great deal...it is definitely worth trying. Click the following link to activate the code...

https://www.relayfoods.com/friend/CSRSWQ

You can order up until midnight before a next day pick up. Happy online grocery shopping!

*Relay Foods did not compensate me to write this post but they did graciously give me groceries for the week.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.