Meal Planning Organization

While I love to cook, making time to plan weekly menus and get to the grocery store can be a time-consuming chore.  In the past few years, I've been using a great, FREE meal planning website/app for organizing recipes and grocery shopping.  It's called Ziplist. 

Once you are registered for Ziplist, you can choose recipes from Ziplist or add your own.  There's a button you can download to place in your Toolbar.  Then when you find a recipe you like, you click the button and the recipe is added to your personal recipe box on Ziplist.  Now, let's move on to the planning.  In the photo below, the grocery list on the left is empty and there are three recipes showing after I did a search of my recipe box for "shrimp."

I clicked on a recipe for a Shrimp Linguine with a Tomato Feta Sauce (bottom left in the screen shot above).  In the photo below, you can see part of the recipe, and when I click on the green link that says "Full Instructions on Closet Cooking," it takes me to the website where I originally "pinned" the recipe.  It's very much like Pinterest, except you are pinning to a recipe box.  At this point, I won't go to the full recipe yet.  I'll wait to do that when I'm ready to cook.

Next, is a really cool feature.  I clicked on a button to Add Ingredients and the photo below shows part of the list of ingredients.  I can scroll down to see the whole list.  Then I uncheck any ingredients that I already have and don't need to buy.  Once I'm finished, I click the green button that says "Add ingredients to my list."

Boom!  The ingredients are in my grocery list.  But you want to see the coolest part?  If I have the free Ziplist app downloaded on my smartphone, the list appears there, too!

***For a more detailed tutorial, check you my YouTube video linked below.***

Simply by clicking the plus in the top right corner, allows me to add additional items to my grocery list.  No more hand writing lists.  No more losing your lists.  Just open the Ziplist app when you're at the store and pick up what you need.  By clicking the box in front of each item, it disappears and you only see the remaining items.  Brilliant!