Show Notes

Episode 209: Meal Planning

What’s for dinner? Wouldn’t you like to have a ready answer for that question? Shannon is living the meal planning dream and in this episode she and Janine talk about the benefits of meal planning and how Shannon goes about doing it. Be ready to be inspired!

Discussion topics include:

  • Janine’s challenges with meal planning (which revolve around the fact she doesn’t cook)
  • Shannon’s helpful husband, Mike
  • How Shannon’s meal planning makes her week better
  • Planning shopping as well as meals
  • Shannon’s jumping off point: What she already has in the freezer
  • How Shannon’s basement freezer is organized (an inventory is involved!)
  • AnyList, the app Shannon uses to inventory her freezer and pantry
  • Shannon’s favorite tools for pre-portioned food in her freezer: vacuum sealer machine + Souper Cubes
  • Trello, Shannon’s secret weapon for meal planning
  • The value of meal kits for bringing new recipes into our lives
  • What’s for dinner at Shannon’s house: Burst Cherry Tomato Pasta
  • How meal planning is a great form of self care

Here’s a screenshot of Shannon’s meal planning Trello board.

Links:

 

2 thoughts on “Episode 209: Meal Planning”

  1. Shannon, I love your Trello board. I’m an avid Trello user myself. Thank you for the tip about the Any List app. I have created lots of different lists on my phone now (e.g., movies to rent), not just grocery lists.

    I use a recipe app called Cook’n. It runs on Windows, Macs, and mobile devices. It scrapes a recipe from most of the top recipe websites and creates a recipe card stored in my personal cookbook. You can also scan a recipe into Cook’n from a recipe card or manually enter one. It has thousands of ingredients and brands in its database. Captured recipes are stored in the Cook’n cloud so they are always accessible on your phone if needed. Your cookbooks/recipes are private and unsearchable by others unless you share them (or just a single recipe) with someone else.

    You can create custom categories (tags) to apply to recipes. For example, I use the “chicken” category to identify recipes containing chicken. Then if I’m looking for a chicken recipe I just pull up that category list.

    Using the desktop software, I can click and drag recipes to create a menu plan and then generate a shopping list for that menu plan.

    I’ve been using this Cook’n for more than 10 years and just LOVE it! I have collected nearly 10,000 recipes from the internet. Check it out here:
    http://www.dvo.com/recipe-app.php
    FYI, I have no affiliation with Cook’n other than being a devoted user.

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