Adventures in Menu-making

I had posted on Facebook recently that I was going to try to stretch my tax return as far as it will go this year by trying to make our paychecks last longer for groceries and gas and the day to day, week to week stuff we always need.  I'm the main money person in our household in terms of money management (Thad is a spender, not a manager), and now that my husband is going back to school we'll have a nice sum of debt to pay back after he gets the degree he's going to work on.

I had been using Ziplist, and I loved it, it lets you add your recipes that you like and make shopping lists out of the recipes, but it had no planner capabilities.  I really need a planner.  I used to use Tasty Planner, but had made the switch over to Ziplist.  Someone I worked with recommended Pepper Plate, and oh boy I'm in love.  I've worked out the initial kinks (what is the difference between the Menu option and the Planner option?) and found that they offer a bookmark button that lets you add a recipe from a webpage you are viewing.  If it's one of the website supported by Pepper Plate you don't even have to copy/paste, but if not the copy/paste is all done in a sidebar on the page and is SUPER EASY.  Case in point, I added about 30 recipes to it this morning from various places.

After I added all my recipes for the morning I started adding the things I plan to make to my Planner.  Menus are where you can combine recipes you plan to make for the same meal into a Menu, and then you can add those grouped recipes to your Planner.  Once I picked the days of the week I was going to make my meals you add that days to your Shopping List, which I had already customized to match the aisles at our nearest Walmart so it would group my ingredients into where I would find them.  I took out the stuff I knew I already had, added a few things that weren't food related (like diapers) and voila, we're ready to hit the store.

I've also been using Pinterest a bit more these days, which has introduced me to a lot of really awesome recipes and some homemade cleaning products, so as I find these I will probably start adding them to Pepper Plate.  I also fell in love with a blog called Mama Loves Food that has pretty much given me a new reason to live.... or at least cook :)

I'm still working on a way to capitalize on my children.  They are cute but I don't know if I'm the kind of mother that can force them into child modeling.  I'll work on loosening my morals on the subject a little more :)