Over the past couple years we’ve been trying, and sometimes failing, at meal planning. I explored what it was like Meal Planning and Batch Cooking. The verdict, I found meal planning to be a huge time saver and made weeknights WAY more enjoyable. Have you tried meal planning?? My biggest hurdle is finding recipes. A lot of the time we fall back on recipes we’ve made before or we think of new recipes and then when we start planning cannot remember what they were.

I had an idea the other day as Pinterest has a new feature where you start a section within a board. Genius! Mark is actually on Pinterest, he likes to look for gift ideas and is constantly dreaming of renovating. I figured I would start a meal planning board we could both contribute to. Do you follow me on Pinterest, you should! I am always pinning DIY ideas, room makeovers and frugal fashion.

Lets walk through the three easy steps

Create a board

You will find the + symbol at the top of your profile, I am sure you are very familiar with this feature!

Add sections

Once you create the board, open it and you will see + Add section at the top. Organize sections in a way that makes sense to you. We decided to use the date for the start of the week we were planning for.

Start pinning

Do you have recipes saved on your phone, computer and Pinterest? I did! The Meal Planning board was an easy way to bring in past recipes, plus find new ones. In the future it’s a simple place for both of us to search for recipes we enjoyed.

Not only does this save time when planning for the week, as recipe ideas come up we can pin them in the upcoming weeks. Right now we already have the recipes for two weeks ahead picked, here’s where we can take it next level! I’m all about having everything work in the background, in terms of scheduling the blog, meal planning, having my plants on a water timer, you get the idea.

The Pinterest Meal Planning board was going to allow me to do the same. Not only do I know the recipes we will be using, I can order and schedule our groceries accordingly! What? Yes this was one of the areas that was the key to our previous meal planning experiment. By ordering the groceries online you can stay on budget, only purchase what you need and it’s a huge time saver.

Anyone else trying to meal plan? Have any successes or fails? I’d love to hear about them. As a kid I grew up in the country and my mom meal planned but I never realized it. She did a big grocery shop once a week and knew exactly what she needed because she had her recipes picked out. It was easy to get dinner ready and we had all of our lunches prepped early in the week.  As an adult I get the value of meal planning and appreciate the time I get back during the week.

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