J.L. Long Middle School PTA president Stacey Stabenow / Photo by Benjamin Hager
Stacey Stabenow amazed her friends with meal organization. The whiteboard in her kitchen always contained a menu for the week, and she only went grocery shopping once a week.
“I’ve done it for years because it’s just something I do,” Stabenow says. “I like to cook, and going to the grocery store every day would make me crazy.”
Eventually, a few of her friends offered to pay her if she would email them her meal plans and grocery lists. She thought it was crazy, but she agreed to put them on a blog.
“I thought, ‘Oh, nobody will ever read this except my friends,’ ” she says. But 350 people signed up when she started offering free trial memberships this past August.
Stabenow, who is president of the J.L. Long Middle School PTA, offers one free recipe a week at nomoretogo.com. She has about 70 paid subscribers now. They pay about $5 a month for the whole package — meal plans, shopping lists and recipes. The recipes are healthy and varied. A sample menu includes steak tacos on Monday and pulled pork sandwiches on Thursday.
“It’s something that I was doing for myself and my family anyway, and people really benefit from it,” Stabenow says. “I don’t do casseroles. I don’t do canned or boxed.”
She tries all the recipes ahead of time to make sure they work, and she has a handful of fans who send pictures of their meals and carry on discussions about them on Facebook.
“The only thing is, my 9-year-old gets tired of it because she’s like, ‘We never eat out!’ “
