This week, I am trying to learn how to do Meal Planning.
So, first of all, I began reading about meal planning on the internet, and as you might suspect there are lots of blogs giving you top tips. In fact Google gave me 22 million search results (I didn’t have time to read them all, aha ha) including the following:
I then ended up browsing different recipe sites, (getting distracted by pictures as usual) looking for fast and easy recipes. At the moment, I want fast and easy, rather that challenging and useful-to-develop-advanced-cooking-skills.
I found this site; Cook Smarts which has a nifty meal planning service. You can start with a free sample and then pay a monthly fee to make full use of all the recipes, plans and other little add-ons.
https://www.cooksmarts.com/weekly-meal-plan-service/
I decided to have a go of the free sample. It’s very user-friendly and has not just healthy meal recipes and a planning system, but also includes things like the nutritional breakdown of the meal. I love this feature, I am a bit geeky like that. Not only can you see the number of calories / carbs etc… but you can see the breakdown per food item which means you can make choices, if you want fewer calories you can decrease the quantity of the relevant item.
So I began planning. What happened to me though, is that I had seen some other recipes from other sites that I wanted to include, and as far as I can see, you have to use recipes from the Cook Smarts site.
Now I understand why, because then they can give you accurate nutrition breakdown, they can compile your shopping list (which is a cool feature btw), and it all works within one eco-system.
So, I did what everyone does when using technology to get things done, I used the tools I was already familiar with.
Now, when cooking in the kitchen, I usually follow recipes by getting them on my iPhone. So, I added (bookmarked) all the 5 meals from CookSmarts to my Safari Reading list (in a folder marked Meal Plans) and also added 2 other recipes from anther site.
This helped me not only access them all, but by tagging each recipe with a day and meal (e.g. SAL is Saturday Lunch)) I can also see what I am having each day.
When I go shopping, I use pen and paper (I know, very old hat). So I didn’t use the great ingredient shopping list feature, I just wrote out the list of things from all recipes that I didn’t already have.
I have been cooking and following the plan. It’s great. As usual, the unexpected happened. I made too much yesterday, and had extras left over for the next day. So, the planner just got set back by one meal.
So far, I am quite liking the approach. I have just written a review of one of the meals I made, on the SmartCooks website – all part of entering the community spirit; nice!
Let’s see how the rest of the week goes!