meal planning

Early last year, I got it into my head that I wanted all the recipes from all my cookbooks and magazine tear outs indexed in one place on my computer so that it was easy to pull together a meal plan. At that time, I decided to start by listing them all out by dish type in a basic text editor.

More recently, I was browsing around the blogosphere and came across Mommy Snack’s Menu Planning Recipe Box and I loved the spreadsheet idea but it needed a little tweaking to work for me.

Here’s what I came up with (click the image to enlarge):

Download the .xls file so you can play around with it yourself.

I’ve got several columns for sorting the data in various ways, left to right they are:

• a place to mark which recipes I’d like to use on my next meal plan
• name
• type of dish (main, side, salad, dessert, etc)
• protein
• produce
• starch
• tried/favorite
• notes (seasonal info or cooking notes if I want to make changes to the recipe in the future)
• source

Rather than using Google Docs (which I love because I can access my files easily from multiple computers), I decided to go with Microsoft Excel. Excel does a couple things that made my digital recipe box easier than it would have been in Google Docs: 1) it remembers what you typed in the same field in rows above so that you don’t need to type the same cookbook name over and over again, 2) it has filters so that once all my recipes are in, I can easily narrow it down to just chicken dishes, just desserts, just recipes I’ve marked as favorites, or even search for recipes with the word chocolate in the title.

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