If you’re anything like me, you may find it difficult to keep track of your favorite recipes, get overwhelmed when browsing new recipes, or maybe you’re not even sure where to begin when it comes to meal planning.
First of all, if you don’t plan your meals at all, now is a great time to start! Planning out your meals (or at the very least your dinners) will save you money as well as immense amounts of time and stress wondering what you should cook for your next meal.
I’m not a stickler about planning my weekly meals every Sunday or anything like that, but before we go to the grocery store I do choose 3 or 4 dinner meals to cook, and a few lunch and breakfast items to fill in the gaps. We shop about once a week, sometimes more if I forget an item. But we always stick to the list. That’s what works for us – you’ll have to find your own rhythm to figure out what works for you and your family!
I have a few favorite tools that I use when searching for new recipes and making my shopping list. I’m a very visual person, so I almost always want to see a photograph of the dish I’m going to make before I make it. If a certain recipe doesn’t look appetizing, I’m much less inclined to want to try making it. The tools below are very visual-oriented, and I hope you’ll find them as helpful as I do!
Pinterest – This is my catch-all for finding recipes. I have my This Wild Season account for general food and kitchen inspiration, as well as a few boards on my personal account dedicated to food, drinks, and inspiration for that coffeeshop/bakery I dream of owning one day.
The beauty of Pinterest is that you can create as many boards as you like for as many topics as you choose. Want to split your food board into sides, main dishes, and desserts? You can do that!
I’ve even created a secret board to keep track of the recipes I’ve tried and loved. I use my public boards to collect ideas, inspiration, and recipes I might one day try. And then I’ll repin the best recipes to my secret board – making notes on what I want to try or change the next time I make the recipe. This is super helpful when I’m working on perfecting a recipe to share here with all of you!
Yummly – This is another great tool for collecting recipes you want to try. It’s Pinterest-y in its layout and each photograph includes notes on cooking time, how many ingredients are involved, and it always links back to the original blog post.
I personally love that you can install what they call the “Yum” button. When you’re browsing through food blogs and come across a recipe you want to save, you simply hit the Yum button on your browser. It automatically saves that recipe to your Recipe Box on their site.
Once you’ve “yummed” a recipe, you can place it in a “collection” such as breakfasts, dinners, or desserts. I imagine this would be a great way to keep track of large amounts of recipes and not run the risk of overwhelming your followers over on Pinterest with 872 “super simple slow cooker recipes.”
FoodGawker – This is a great site for recipes with beautiful food photography. FoodGawker has a submission process and they only accept blog posts that have high quality photographs.
Since I’m a visual person, this site is awesome for searching out delicious looking recipes! I just trust that if someone took the time to make their recipe look beautiful, they also care enough to make it taste delicious. That’s probably flawed logic, but it hasn’t gotten me into too much trouble so far!
FoodGawker also has a great search feature that’s super helpful to find what you’re looking for! You search by category or keyword, save favorites, and even look at the current popular recipes to see what others are enjoying.
Sticky Notes – Nope. That’s not the name of some new app. I’m talking about old school sticky notes. The ones you used to collect in wild colors and stick all over your walls and school notebooks in an attempt to keep yourself organized. What? You still do that? Oh good, me too.
Lately I’ve gotten in a habit of reading cookbooks from start to finish. I’ve made it through The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
While I read, I try to keep a stack of sticky notes next to me, and I mark each recipe I want to make. My cookbooks all have little sticky-note-fringe poking out the top of their pages now. It’s perfect for meal planning because I can quickly flip back through a book to find a recipe I wanted to make.
What about you? How do you keep track of your favorite recipes? Do you have a recipe box – real or online – where you gather your favorites? Share it with me in the comments below! I’d love to follow you on Pinterest or Yummly or wherever you keep your recipe inspiration!
If you’re looking to find This Wild Season on the sites I’ve recommended, you can find me here on Pinterest, Yummly, and FoodGawker. See you over there!
This post contains affiliate links (to some of my favorite cookbooks!) but all opinions are my own.