Meal Planning Tip: Keep a Running List of Recipes You Want to Make for Dinner

published Apr 30, 2014
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(Image credit: Emma Christensen)

If you spend your days reading food blogs, flipping through food magazines, and browsing cookbooks, chances are good you run into a lot of recipes you want to try. But how to ensure you actually make the recipes and don’t just let them disappear into the depths of Pinterest or your recipe binder? This is the very simple system that works for me.

New dinner recipes are the ones I am always most eager to try, but for a long time, I was random in the recipes I chose to shop for and cook. If I found a good recipe on the day I went grocery shopping, I would make it, but more often than not after bookmarking a recipe, I never looked at it again.

Then I started keeping a running list of the dinner recipes I wanted to try and referencing it when I sat down to make my weekly meal plan. Sounds like a no-brainer, but until I made the process more systematic, I would sit there every week racking my brain, trying to remember where I saw that recipe I wanted to make — what was in it again?

I use Paprika to store the recipes I find online and in magazines, so I just have a “New Dinners” category that I use for appealing recipes I want to try. Creating a dedicated Pinterest board or

Evernote

Just remember to set aside a little time on a regular basis to look through your choices. I like to do it on grocery shopping day, to make sure I don’t lose the momentum or inspiration to try something new.

Do you have a system for organizing the new recipes you want to try?

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