The Dreaded Meal Planning

Years ago, I decided Thursday nights would be my night to meal plan. At one time, I sat down with the ads and planned around the sales. Then a few years passed and I planned around our CSA box. A few more years passed and I planned for all things gluten-free while we worked to eliminate bathroom troubles and other issues in our family.

Sometime in those years I discovered that if I kept my recipes in one place, planning was easier. For a while, I kept clipped and torn recipes from magazines in a binder, and used allrecipes.com for online searches and a digital recipe box (which reminds me, some of my fave recipes are still hanging out there, unused for quite some time).

I was keeping things in places that masqueraded as neat and organized, but I still spent hours planning for one week. Digging through recipes, cross-checking with sales, asking Fence what he wanted to eat. It was a pain.

Truthfully, I still think meal planning is a pain. I am exhausted at the end of the day and planning takes mental energy. Mental energy is high demand and short supply around here. And if I wake up to plan on Saturday morning before a grocery run, I still whine to myself because I would rather be on a run, or cleaning house, or working in the garden, or sewing, or…

But, if I don’t plan, then we eat breakfast for dinner all week.

Plan I must.

Lately (as in, for several years now) I use Plan to Eat for my planning. I {heart} this site, because it saves me time. (**affiliate alert. Try Plan to Eat free for 30 days. Then if you love it and subscribe, I earn a smidge back. Wonder what I do with what I earn? I give it away, to people like Cameron who needs a diabetic alert dog.)

I input recipes, and drag and drop them onto a calendar. Then! Oh, the wonders of the digital world, the site creates a grocery list for me. How I love that. It is brilliant. I can edit the list, too. And things get better, because I can save menus, duplicate meals, and even mark for freezer meals. It is SO crazy easy to add recipes to Plan to Eat, also, that I just can’t help but love and and renew my subscription every year (which I found out has been since 2011). There is a nifty little toolbar bookmark widget thingy (the technical term escapes me) and you can click it when you are visiting ANY SITE–even blogs–to add your recipe to your personal recipe box on Plan to Eat. It works almost all the time for me, and when it doesn’t, they tell you what to do. So, I have recipes in my box from blogs, allrecipes.com, tastykitchen.com, epicurious.com…all saved in one handy place.

It is a game-changer.

Now, I still don’t love the planning, but I do at least have a useful tool. And guess what, smart phone users, you can access your list from your phone. So super handy.

I still could use ideas, though…what are your best tips and time-savers for meal planning? Do you plan one night a week that is always the same? Help a girl out. Any tips to save me hassle are MUCH appreciated!