Looking for Advice with Menu Planning & Recipe Organization

I enjoy using mealsmatter.org. You can submit recipies to a personal cookbook and create menus. It's a great, free site.

1 mom found this helpful

Okay, here's a different response:

Wow! You guys are all so organized! I'm hoping (to make myself feel better) that out of all the subscribers to this site there's only 11 people as hyper-uber-organized as you guys. The rest of us are just normally functioning 'think of dinner that day', maybe even as we walk into the kitchen that night pondering...'what will it be tonight?' Man, I would hire one of you to do it for me! I have the hardest time just thinking up one night's menu and what all my picker eaters will eat and how much of my hard work will get thrown out.

I hope you're all enjoying this light-hearted 'other side of the story' look at meal planning. Definitely my weakness! That being said...I'm actually a good (decent?) cook with tons of great recipes,none of which my entire gaggle of kids will eat.

Hey A.!

I am just like you in that I have a ton of recipes here, there, & everywhere - recipe books and lots of magazine clippings that I've collected over the years.

Unfortunately, I'm not very good at organizing. But, I've always wanted to create a RECIPE SCRAPBOOK with all my recipes in one, easy to find place. This way I could paste my clippings and I could also type up my favorite recipes & keep them in here too. And I could also create tabs seperating them. This is just a thought that I had for myself to do one day ... along with not being very organized, I'm also a perfectionist proscrastinator :) not a good combination, huh? ha-ha! :)

Your idea of an online storage idex is a great idea too! Just like there's online scrapbooks - I'm sure there's a website for storing recipes like this as well. This would be very convenient & ORGANIZED! :) Good luck with everything. Thanks - you've given me something to think about for my own collection.

Have a great day!!
M. :)

Hi A.,
There is a website called "Recipe Zaar". I love it! If you purchase a membership you can submit all your recipes. You can either mark them "private" or if you want to mark "public" others can view them and rate them. You have your own home page with all your recipes listed and then you also have thousands of recipes at your finger tips. What I love about recipezaar is their rating system. You can pull up a recipe by Highest rated ( or various other categories) and read others reviews of what they thought of the recipe. You can also list your review and it keeps all your recipes and the ones that you have reviewed in one easy and convenient place. Here is a link to my page.
http://www.recipezaar.com/member/65936
Hope you enjoy the website as much as I do.
Janet

We have some things in common, it seems. I do the same thing with my meals...I print a calendar out for the month with the meals typed in each day. I don't have a business or anything, but I include photography into my many hobbies. I have been working on making a photobook/recipe book. I emailed my family and had them send family recipes and favorites and I chose all the ones I wanted and am putting them into a book for myself. That's what I do. Plus when I make a dinner lately, I make an extra and put it in my freezer so that when I have the baby, I'll be stocked up on dinners...one less thing to worry about (I'm due in 1 mo). Hope this helps you!

ok, so I thought I was really into this until reading some of the other replies!LOL! I simply write my meal plan down on a huge calander in my kitchen. My family will make comments on it, as far as special requests/favorites/or remind me of upcoming events when we might bave dinner guests that I sometimes forget about/or won't be home for a meal. I also like to buy my meat in bulk, cooking up to 50 pounds of beef at a time,seperating it into tupperware containers and popping them into the freezer to save on prep time! I also do this with cooking a few chickens at a time, dividing the meat for pot pies/casseroles and other things. It sure is a time saver when I'm running late or am just worn out from a day at work.
Hope these ideas help you!

I know there are computer 'cooking' programs that come with massive amts of recipes, and you can add your own in there as a 'cookbook.' My mom has Cookin' Collection which allows you to type in a genre of food you are interested in, type of food (entree, dessert, etc) or even a few ingredients that you have to use and it will pull up recipes for you. Then you just print them out as you need them. If you don't like a genre (Greek or something) you can delete that entire selection. My mom typed all hers in and printed them out and stores them in 3-ring binder with dividers. So they are all in one place, and she has a database of new ones to try!

I would suggest Excel at the bottom, you can ad sheets to the "book" Each tab down there could be renamed for the recipe and you can move them around so that you have them in order of meat or day you plan to prepare them.

Microsoft Works has a template for recipe collections as well. I don't know how well it works.

Personally, I recieved America's Test Kitchen's Family Cookbook and in the back there is a section of meal planning. I took the suggestions and over the next 3 months I made different meals (which I planned a month in advance as well) When I had a list of the guys' favorites I made a permanent menu from it. and in the far column I put the page number of the book. Now I know my husband can make it just as well and I don't have to find the recipe in a different book for him.

I also created a shopping list in Excel that I could sort as to where I can buy the product and how many times it occurs in my menu.

Like the others I have clippings and odd pages from here and there, boxes and print outs. These are in a binder. I long to take the time to move them into a paperless collection. I've become very adept at burning CD's but sometimes I have trouble getting them to open again.

I am the same way about our meals. I went through all of my cookbooks because Ihad way too many. I picked out all of the recipes my family would enjoy and wrote them down adn keep them in a binder. As I get new recipes from the internet that we try and like I print them out and put them into the binder also. I find this to be the easiest way for me to keep the tasty meal plans all together.
H.

Try one of these sites:

http://allrecipes.com/default.aspx
http://www.dirfile.com/cook_n_recipe_organizer.htm
http://www.brothersoft.com/downloads/recipe-organizer.html

I guess I'm a bit old-fashioned. I don't use computer programs or anything, I just write all my favorite recipes on notecards, and put them all in a little index. I keep it in the kitchen, sitting right by the stove. My mother and all my family on her side have always done it that way, so it's the only way I've ever thought to do it. I am not as organized as to plan out dinner for a month, but it seems like a really good idea. I'm going to have to try it out sometime. Well, good luck with your organizing. That's always the hard part! ;)

A.

Hi A. -

I have used Master Cook software for a long time and it is great. It has a ton of great recipes but also allows you to add your own. You can plan out your menus and then it will build your shopping list for you. Another great feature is that it allows you to scale recipes to fit your family size. I use that feature a lot if I'm entertaining or once I found a recipe that I love but it serves 30, (slightly larger than my family) so I was able to scale it down. Makes life much easier.

Another great feature is that you can search by ingredient so if you're wondering what to do with that leftover green onion, you can search for recipes that use green onion...

One tip, whatever program you choose, CREATE A BACK-UP, my computer crashed and I lost a lot of stuff. Luckily, I'm pretty much a pack rat so I hadn't gotten rid of some of my hard copies yet.

If you're familiar with Excel, it's really easy to set up a combined cookbook on your computer, and you can have it export directly to a seperate meal plan for the month. If you'd like some help setting it up, feel free to email me (____@____.com). There's also http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook which is a pretty simple wiki if you know some basic html, etc. You could pretty easily set up a personal page to link your meal plans for the month on.

hello, A.
I have organized my recipes by photo copying them. Then I went and bought a big binder and some of those plactic page protctors, then put all my recipes that I use toghter. well hope this was some help Good luck!

Hi A.!

You might want to check out Menu Planning Central at http://www.menuplanningcentral.com/order/go.php?r=435&amp...

I have also used MasterCook Deluxe software with much success! I found it on EBay for between $10 and $15.

Good luck!!

This is what I did... I have a program but it is a bit annoying for me... I typed up the recipes or found the same ones online and printed them off, I have a BIG binder with clear sheet protectors and a section for each dish, like desserts, main dishes, breakfast... etc.... and the recipes We like and use alot are in the front of their section and on the content page of that section they are highlighted so that i know we like those ones. if i fix something and we don't like it i take the recipe out and put it with my cookbooks. I took the recipes that i like from my cookbooks and typed them up as well and marked on the sheet what cookbook i got it from. it took a little while to get this organized but most of my recipes were already typed up since most came from my mom and from when i took a Food class in school.

check out blurb.com and look under 'other books' at the bottom-I am thinking of doing a 'family' cookbook with my fav recipes that we always use and that the kids will remember as they get older, then I can pass it onto them! I think you can put your own pics in too of the dishes and it would be an easy go to book as well as a working heirloom!!