I always get questions/comments from people about our meal planning, and
the last post on that topic was pretty popular, so I thought I'd share how I use Pinterest as a meal planning tool.
I'm always surprised to learn that people "pin" recipes and food ideas on Pinterest but never make them. Based on what I hear from friends and family, that's what most people do. Nothing wrong with that, but I've found Pinterest to be a great meal-planning tool. I use recipes I've pinned all the time!
Originally I just had the one board for all of my food inspiration pins. Lately I've found that I had so many recipe pins on one board that I was only ever making the ones that were most recently pinned. So in the past few weeks, I've broken down the boards into categories based on how I plan our meals.
{side note: someone please suggest a better name for this board. i don't love it.}
This was my original food board and is still the one with the most pins. These are where my "normal" {i.e. with meat/seafood} recipes go.
This is one of the newer boards. We've been doing meatless mondays for awhile now and this just makes those recipes that much easier to find. For reference, we don't eat seafood on meatless mondays, but we do have eggs.
I started this board back in the fall when I started our soup sundays routine. One of my favorite things about fall is making soups, but before I designated one day a week for soups, I would either make soup every day of the week or forget about soups entirely and would end up only making one or two soups the whole season.
This is my newest board. I am terrible at picking/planning sides to go with our main dishes. I normally just make frozen veggies. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there are so many healthy, creative, and tasty side dishes out there that I feel like I need to up my game a few times a week. I've had many of these recipes pinned for ages, but they got lost in the mix. Not anymore!
Breakfast/brunch is my favorite meal of the day. I don't really make breakfast; that's M's job. But I love to make big brunch feasts, so now I have a place to collect all of those ideas. This is the most droolworthy board, in my humble opinion.
Like the side dishes, these were originally pinned on my regular food board, but I kept forgetting about them. Now whenever I feel like splurging or baking something fun for my coworkers, I've got a quick reference board of new things to try.
This was one of my early Pinterest boards, but it used to be just for party decor/invitations images. I started adding dips and other party food to this board because it's just more intuitive, at least the way I think. I think this is my favorite board!
I'm curious: how many of you make the recipes you pin and how many of you pin it and forget it {or stare at it hungrily}? No judgement either way! I just think it's interesting to see the different ways people use social media. If you've made anything, what's your favorite recipe that you've pinned? I'm always looking for new inspiration!
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