I have been looking for ways to eat healthier lately and save money by cooking for myself.  My friend Beerorkid puts up lots of the meals he's prepared on his website and has inspired me to start cooking/eating better.  They usually look amazingly delicious and inspired me.  Recipe books simply don't appeal to me (they take up space, take time to look recipes up, have a limited selection) not to mention the annoyance of dealing with grocery lists (copying stuff from a book back to paper only to look it back up from the book later always seemed wrong somehow.

I looked through a bunch of websites and one that does a fairly good job at it is http://tastyplanner.com/ it's thoughtfully laid out, simple to use, free, and doesn't spam you with messages.

It has a very, very nice meal-planner (a weekly meal list) laid-out as a calendar plus it's mostly AJAX (smooth, intuitive UI.) You can easily drop recipes to your weekly meal list, move them to a day, two days, repeating recipes, etc, whatever easily.  You can also export the weekly meal to a calendar.  The nicest thing is that you can export all ingrediants to a grocery list you can print out with two clicks, or even use an iphone at the store to check items off as you go.

It's not perfect, the recipe list is limited, the grocery list needs to have a syntax so you don't have things like "water", "salt", or "optional" show up on the grocery list, and the UI can be a little quirky at times.  All of that being said, it will be planning my meals for the future, I'm going to do my part to add some recipes that I enjoy to increase it's size, it's free, and it's simply amazing.

The only alternative I've found that works as well is straight from Hy-Vee http://www.hy-vee.com/recipes/recipes.asp