Meal Wrangling

Trying to live a more simple, well-organised life means getting the whole dinner situation under control. This is the area with which I struggle the most – I go through phases of having all our meals planned for the next fortnight or beyond only for it all to fall apart when the next lot of planning is needed. Then comes the next three weeks of eating hotch-potch meals with emergency trips to the Co-Op to buy supplies – hardly intentional living.

So I have been working on setting in place a system using Ziplist which will help with the loathsome planning phase so that (hopefully) I wont need to put it off again and again. I have started added any online recipes I like or want to try to Ziplist – it has a nifty recipe clipper which makes it super-easy to grab recipes which link back to the source so you always know where they are from and in fact, usually you need to click back through so that you can see the instructions.  I am also manually adding recipes that I love from my books.

This is fairly laborious but I do have a reason. Ziplist has a great shopping list function. you can click on a recipe, it pulls all the ingredients into a list with check-boxes so you can remove the items you already have in the cupboard and add the rest to a list.

Eventually, once I have a large pool of recipes, I should be able to whizz through the ones I have chosen for that particular week/fortnight and add the ingredients to a shopping list.  It will also mean that all my favourite recipes are in one place AND I will have access to these anywhere since Ziplist do in fact have an iPhone app for that. Finally, you can tag your recipes making it easy to keep them organised so I have a set for dinner, a set for buffet/party food, a set for trying – recipes that sound lovely but I haven’t tried yet and a set for my daughter (although she will be eating with us more and more).

I need to then record the list of recipes I have chosen for any given period somewhere – perhaps I will print this off and put it in my home management notebook. I have already mentioned that I am loathe to assigning particular meals to particular days given that our plans change so quickly so a list of ‘current’ recipes which I have the ingredients for will work just fine.