Five Minute Fixes: Meal Planning with Pinterest

I hardly ever crack open a cookbook these days. Last summer, I even downsized my cookbook collection, only keeping a few of my favorites. Almost all the recipes I use are online, and I have most of the links to them saved on Pinterest.

I know I’m not alone in finding and saving recipes on Pinterest. I open up my feed and 75 percent of the stuff on there is food related. I have lots of boards, and I try to keep organized by putting my recipes in categories like chicken, salads, soups, etc. But even with separate boards it can be a hassle to find a specific recipe pin when I’m ready to make it for dinner. So, to make life simple, I created a new board called Meal Plan.

I usually sit down on Sunday afternoon to do meal planning for the week. The first thing I do is open up Pinterest and browse the recipes I have saved on there for meal ideas. If I decide I’m going to make one that week, I re-pin that recipe to the Meal Plan board. It just makes it really easy to find them later in the week. I keep the board uncluttered by deleting the pins from the week before. (It just removes the re-pin from the Meal Plan board. It’s still on the board I pinned it to the first time.) That way there’s only a handful of recipes on the board at any one time. It’s easier than scrolling through all 72 of my boards and trying to remember which one it was saved on originally. Even if I can remember what board it’s on, some have hundreds of pins on them that I have to look through to find just one. This saves me a lot of time at 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

If you don’t have a Pinterest account yet, give it a try. I think it’s the best and easiest way to save links to anything you want to find again online.