Menu Planning with Google

I am reposting this for this week’s themed version of Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family. The theme is Orgnizing Tips. Using Google Calendar for planning our weekly menus is still one of my best organizational tips…Enjoy!

My menu planning used to take place on Sunday nights as I would gather all of my cookbooks around me and pour through them searching for recipes to make for the upcoming week’s dinner.

That is, until I started using my Google Reader and Google Calendar to help in my meal planning endeavors.

I have subscribed to several cooking blogs (I’ll list them below). Oh, and did you know that you can subscribe to Taste of Home’s recipes?? That one RSS subscription has done so much for me in the area of meal planning!! I subscribe to their main dish recipes and lower fat recipes.

I have also become a huge fan of my Google Calendar. I have several different calendar’s set up. I have a color-coded calendar set up for my activities, household chores, crafts, daily routine, special days, and our menu. My husband and I even share calendars. I keep his hidden, but I can pull it up at any time and kind of know what he’s up to.

So, as I read through the blogs in my reader each day, I immediatley add the recipes that look good to my calendar. When I edit the details of the menu calenar’s entry, I paste in the url of the blog or website where the recipe can be found.

I still use my beloved cookbooks, too. When I’m leafing through them, I enter in recipes that catch my eye or that I want to make to my calendar and when I edit the details I type in the name of the cookbook and the page number where the recipe can be found.

Now when I do my weekly planning, I just have to sit at the computer and browse through my calendar at the meals that are already planned on there. Sometimes I may do some tweaking to adjust the meals to my schedule. But it doesn’t take nearly as long.

And I am so super excited that since using this system, I have meals planned until around the time that my husband will be back home from Iraq! It is so much fun to think….”oooh, I can make this for Keith”!

Using my Google Reader and Google Calendar to assist in meal planning has worked for me! To see some great Works for Me ideas from other moms, visit Works for Me Wednesday at We Are That Family.

Oh, and as promised, here’s a list of the food blogs that I have in my reader right now (some of them are more for baking but you should check them out too, because they are oh, so good!!)….

• Bake at 350
• Bakerella
• Cooking During Stolen Moments
• Cooking Tip of the Day
• Good Eats ‘n Sweet Treats
• Good Life {eats}
• Taste of Home

Tagged as: meal planning, Recipes, Works for Me Wednesday