Some of the ladies over at my favorite pho­tog­ra­phy forum have been dis­cussing using e-Mealz for meal plan­ning.  We’ve been using e-mealz for quite some time now and it has been such a san­ity saver for us!  I wrote a post about it a while back, which you can find here.  I men­tioned over there that I use a Google Cal­en­dar in con­junc­tion with our 3 other Google Cal­en­dars for all our going ons, and it’s super slick!  So, I thought I would do a blog post about how I use it in hopes that it would help others.

Before I dive in, I will tell you WHY I use this method.  I am a very elec­tron­i­cally based per­son.  I can’t keep a paper plan­ner and I like my devices in life (hello iPad & iPhone!) So, by using a Google Cal­en­dar method, I am able to pull up our menus & recipes on my phone, iPad, or the com­puter too (or any com­puter for that mat­ter, so long as I have an inter­net con­nec­tion!)  All this to say, this is what works for me, and I encour­age you to tweak this so that it works for YOU!

Now…onto the good stuff!  Let’s get started

1.  Cre­ate a Google Cal­en­dar for Meal Planning.

Start by going to Google Cal­en­dars and setup your Google account if you don’t have one, or log into your cur­rent account.  Cre­ate your new Cal­en­dar (just click the Add but­ton at the bot­tom), I call mine Meal Plan­ning (cre­ative, I know )

Your cal­en­dar should now be cre­ated and show up in your My Cal­en­dars list.  You can also color code your cal­en­dars, as you can see, mine is Orange.

2.  Start Adding Meals to your Calendar!

This is where the fun begins!  I do this step about once a week, at the same time I’m order­ing gro­ceries.  I log into my e-mealz account,  and down­load the cur­rent menus for our meal plans (our fam­ily sub­scribes to the Low-Carb and Por­tion Con­trol Meal Plans for Any Store).  The meal plans are in PDF for­mat, which for­tu­nately, allows you to copy and paste.

So, to add a meal to your cal­en­dar, cre­ate a new event in your Meal Plan­ning Cal­en­dar.  Then, title your event the title of your meal.  Next, sim­ply copy and paste your ingre­di­ent list from the menu into the descrip­tion of your event.  Do the same with the cook­ing instruc­tions and save!

You can also do this with your family’s cur­rent favorite recipes as well!

3.  Plan ahead 

This next part is my absolute favorite part.  You may have noticed it in the graphic above…see if you can fig­ure it out…

.…

.…

Repeat.

You can plan your meals out for months and months ahead by sim­ply click­ing on the Repeat box in your event!

I usu­ally choose to have them repeat every 6 or 8 weeks, and that way, you have an ever-growing list of recipes for your fam­ily that are auto­mat­i­cally show­ing up on your meal plan­ning cal­en­dar!  If there’s some­thing we want to skip, then I just delete that par­tic­u­lar “event” (don’t delete all of the instances) but then the meals con­tinue to show up at my cho­sen incre­ments.  It’s so slick!!

So, when my week is done, this is what my cal­en­dar looks like (I have my other ones hid­den).  I can eas­ily see what meals we have com­ing up and what days we are miss­ing things on (or maybe are eat­ing out that day).  It’s easy to click and drag and move things around to dif­fer­ent days.

Whew!  Ok, that was a lot of steps and info.  There is one more lit­tle bonus thing that I do as well, but I will save that for another post this week.

Feel free to post ques­tions if I missed some­thing or if some­thing isn’t clear!  You can also email me at amylemaniak@gmail.com too.  :-)

Happy Meal Planning!