I recently went a little over the top in terms of my recipe planning… but I am hoping that it will save me time and a few extra minutes down the road.
I love trying new recipes. As I mentioned in a previous post (September) I love using Pinterest for inspiration. There have been a number of times that I have random ingredients in the fridge, and no recipes come to mind. I will search all of those ingredients together on Pinterest and 9/10 times come back with something that I am ready to make for dinner.
The only problem is, that I need to have a steady signal to pull the recipes off my phone while I am in the grocery store. In Oxford, this is a really big challenge. Wi-fi and cell service are spotty at best. I have only ever seen my phone hit 3G, making me actually miss Rogers back home – never thought I would say that. So frequently, I have found myself going back to “old faithful” recipes because I really can’t come up with anything else.
For those of you who don’t use Evernote, I would highly recommend it – if only to monitor your to-do lists, and make amazingly easy grocery lists like this!
For most of these recipes you can find them on my Foodie Pinterest board here.
10 Grocery lists with the recipes attached. 3 of them are my go-to’s so far this fall – the other 7 are recipes that I have pulled from Pinterest today to try them.
To do this yourself, follow these quick steps:
- Download Evernote if you don’t already have it
- Create a notebook called “Grocery Lists” or whatever makes sense for you
- Create each new recipe as it’s own note within this notebook
- Add tags for easy searching
- Share through Evernote with family members who also do the shopping
Yes, I know the level of organization this took was a little over the top for some people, but I now have the recipe, all of the ingredients I need and a handy checklist for every time I need a little inspiration in the grocery store. And all-in-all it took about an hour to search for the recipes I wanted for this week within my board and copy them over into notes.
Taking it a step further, you can add tags to your lists for things like key ingredients (chickpeas, shrimp, kale) types of recipes (Vegan, Vegetarian, side dish) or meal occasions (breakfast, lunch, dinner) – and then search by tag when you need to find something specific.
This is an adapt of a recipe I found. I don’t like cucumber (or olives), but love the flavours in a greek salad.
Happy Planning!
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