Meal planning has really helped us with our time management. As I have discussed, Eric is trying to work out every day, and planning our meals really helps us have the time to do things we want to do after work. Instead of stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work multiple time a week, I have been going to Trader Joes with Heather after yoga to get most (if not all) of the groceries we need for the week. Heather has been meal planning for awhile now, so she is quite the pro, and you can see more about he take on meal planning at her blog Confessions of a Wannabe.
Since Heather and I go shopping on Sunday morning, Eric and I have been sitting down on Saturday to figure out what we want to make for the week. We created a Dropbox folder that we both can edit where I have a meal plan and grocery list. This can then be pulled up on either of our phones when we are on the go and need to see what groceries we need or what the dinner plan is. If the recipe is from someone else's blog, I put their link in the meal plan so I can also click on that and pull it up if I need it while I am at the store. It's very handy. I also add the meal plan to our Google Calendar so we can see it in the calendar instead of pulling up the meal plan in Dropbox.
As you can see, this week's meal plan is inspired by Oh She Glows, as all the new recipes we are trying come from the blog.
Tonight we tried the Rainbow Raw Pad Thai, with a few modifications, and it was quite good. This will be my leftovers for tomorrow since Eric won't be around for dinner. I will post later this week about today's meal and others but, tonight's blog is specifically about the meal planning so I don't want to overdo it. Look for the tasty conclusions to this week's meal planning in later posts.
I'd like to add one more thing. This was an idea Eric had to keep track of recipes we have made and would choose to make again. In addition to having meal plans and our grocery list in our shared Dropbox folder, I have started to add recipes that we've made in a simplified format with ingredients and cooking steps.
What are all the hash tags for you ask? Well, this is how we decided to organize it...
### equals a great meal
## equals a good meal
And then, we use hash tags at the end (ex. #vegan or #dinner) to give specifics about the recipe. Is it a breakfast or dinner, and/or is it vegan.
It's working out quite well. If I decide for example, that I want Strawberry Banana Muffins I can just pull up my Dropbox and click on the recipe to jog my memory on what I need to buy or do. It's much more user friendly than trying to fumble through Pinterest or a blog to find a recipe and read through it all to figure out what needs to happen.
I'm quite pleased with the progress we've made with it and feel that it is extremely helpful. Hopefully you can take some of these ideas and use them to help you get organized. If you have any ideas that may help us, as always, I would love to hear them.
fantastic!
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