For Entertaining

www.dinewithoutwhine.com
What You Get: Recipes for seven entrées, a few desserts and side dishes, and kid-friendly snacks and brunches, plus a shopping list, e-mailed each Thursday, along with a chatty blog.

The Flavor: Kids come first with this menu planner — prepare for cornflake-coated chicken nuggets and homemade caramel corn. Christine Steendahl, a mother of three and the site’s founder, has a soft spot for margarine and certain other outdated ingredients, but many of the recipes, like corn casserole and bread pudding, are the kind of soulful winners that old-fashioned appetites adore. Each newsletter begins with “A Personal Note” that rambles (and rants) with Erma Bombeck–style wit about hair appointments, money woes, kid capers, the works. Steendahl also provides links to other sites a busy mom might find interesting.

Cost: $4.50 a month.

For Picky Eaters

www.savingdinner.com
What You Get: A weekly e-mail with five or six entrée and side-dish recipes that fit your family’s preferences (choose from regular, vegetarian, low-carb, frugal, crock-cooking menus, and others), plus serving suggestions and a shopping list.

The Flavor: Host Leanne Ely, a.k.a. the Dinner Diva (and also featured on the cultlike cleaning and decluttering website Flylady.net), has an eye for healthy recipes. Offerings include skillet pizza and Tuscan bean-and-sausage soup, and they showcase the season, which means blackberry-balsamic glaze in the summer and root-vegetable stew in the fall. Do-ahead tips (cook extra potatoes tonight for tomorrow’s shepherd’s pie) save time and make efficient use of leftovers. Each recipe comes scaled for two or six people. The one downside: E-mails are more visually busy than the rest in this roundup, so it may take a little while to get the hang of them.

Cost: $10 for three months, $18 for six months, $30 for one year.