Meal Planning using Pinterest

One way I got my sanity back when the twins were toddlers was to meal plan my dinners. I could shop once or twice a week and have something on the table with a 5pm panic about "what am I going to make?"

Pinterest has been a huge help in that; at this time, I have made about 250 recipes from Pinterest, 200 of them successful.  My Pins for food are in the thousands, and I love that I can find just about any recipe there. When I browse, I Pin recipes to different boards and when I find one that I want to try right away, it goes on a "Next to Try" board.  That way, I can easily find what I want.

So, on the weekends, I set up my weekly planner and think about what to make for the week ahead. Do we have any dates or special events planned? Is someone coming over or will be absent?

On Mondays, I sing with a community chorus and need to leave directly after dinner.  So usually, I use my CrockPot on Monday, then just soak the crock until the next morning to minimize cleanup.  Here is where Pinterest helped a ton: did you ever notice that CrockPot recipes often taste the same? So many recipes use canned stuff - cream of soups being common.  I try to do "whole food" cooking without using cans of things, so looked up recipes for the CrockPot that were "whole food".  Some of my favorite recipes came from that search!

While I am not a hardcore environmentalist, I have read that by restricting your consumption of beef you can lower your carbon footprint.  To that end, I try to plan only 1 beef meal, then 1 pork/ham meal, 1 vegetarian and fill in with chicken.

In the back of my planner, I keep a running list of meals my family likes, categorized by protein or vegetarian.  I added a column to note if it is a CrockPot dish.  This speeds up my planning because I have it all right there.  If I make a new dish that is a hit, it goes on "the list".  My hubby will often say, "oh, this one goes on the list!"