One of my goals for the new year was to have better meals and better meal plans. I am happy to say that this is one of the goals I am sticking with. Woo-hoo!  Even small successes feel good.  

I am somewhat notorious for setting lofty goals every January because, maybe just because.  Then I never look at them again. I know you are supposed to Plan the Work and then Work the Plan. But I just really prefer the planning, not so much the working.

We’ve got to eat, so I had to make something work here.  This is where Plan to Eat saves the day. For me, a meal plan has historically consisted of a huge calendar-like spreadsheet with meal ideas typed in for 5 weeks at a time and then repeated. It generally didn’t allow me much flexibility the way I had it set up. I like flexible.  I like to try new recipes, but I don’t want to repeat them if they are a flop.

The other challenge I faced this year in menu planing is the switch to gluten-free.  That basically means that I had to find new recipes or modify almost every recipe I have to accommodate my son’s new dietary needs. Sometime just after the first of the year, I started seeing a lot of banners like this:

So, one day, I checked it out. I had tried other meal planning services before, but I might be picky.  I want to choose my own food for the week. Plan to Eat is an easy to use online meal planner that has made my meal planning easy, fun , and successful.  You can search for recipes, it has a cool bookmarklet (this makes is easy to capture recipes from websites), creates a shopping list, and is accessible wherever there is an internet connection, even on my phone.

I love this menu planner! This is one of our new favorite recipes:

Lemon Garlic Chicken