Welcome to the fifth week of 2021 and the final week of our “Make it Fresh” series! We’re focused on keeping our meal plans interesting and fun as we make our way into 2021!
Today, we’d like to remind you of the Menus feature to make your meal plans Simple.
The past four weeks have been about trying new things with your meal planning to keep things interesting. This week, we want to remind you that simple meal planning is great too! Life is busy and it can be hard to find the time or energy to create a brand new meal plan each week.
Our favorite tool to keep meal planning simple is Menus. This feature allows you to save a group of recipes for any length of time for use again in the future. We updated the Menus feature in 2020 to allow for Menu editing and previewing, so the feature is more versatile than ever!
You can create Menus from scratch with the Menu Editor, but if you have a group of planned recipes that are easy and everyone loves, you can save them as a Menu using the Edit Plan options! This way, you always have pre-made meal plans to fall back on when life gets stressful.
To cut down on planning time, you can create a meal planning template and add your weekly/monthly “default” recipes to a Menu. This could be things like “taco Tuesdays” or your favorite spaghetti recipe on Fridays.
When you start your meal planning, plan this “template” Menu first thing to have all your recurring recipes, notes, and ingredients already on the calendar. Then you can fill in the rest of your meals to suit that week!
Or, if you’d like something new in your meal plan, you can preview and plan Menus from your Plan to Eat Friends! In the Menus side panel, you can use the dropdown to see Menus your Friends have saved. This can help keep your planning simple, but also open up your meal plan to new recipes!
Thanks for joining us in this series of blogs and tips to help keep your meal planning fresh, original, practical, exciting, and simple!
