Menu-planning has been sort of all over the place. We plan menus every week, but when it comes to holiday planning, we have never been really organized. Mostly we had planned our menus and created Google Docs for each year with links to recipes as needed or references to where to find the recipe in the cookbooks. I will tell you this has been totally messy and hard to find previous menus. Even typing menu into google doesn’t always bring up all of the documents.
In an effort to decrease clutter and focus some of our digital mess into a more organized fashion we have begun using Microsoft’s OneNote to website recipes clippings (I still do a bunch of it on Pinterest) and paper recipes. It’s our digital cookbook. We had scanned tons of stuff a while ago that’s just sitting on a Google drive and hard to search, so moving forward we have started adding them into the Microsoft’s OneNote
This year, we tried using OneNote during Passover for our meal planning and organizing. It was surprisingly awesome! We had just installed Microsoft Office 365 on our computers and phones. We didn’t get to everything in our plan and had to readjust because our oven died when I was cleaning it for the holiday, but it did help with the process. This probably could be done with Evernote too, but I haven’t ever use Evernote.
We created the plan and then we linked to the recipes that were in the notebook. We also created a shopping list on the side with check off boxes. Because I could access the shopping list, menu, and recipes all at the same time, it made shopping easy. I could go back to look at recipes if I wanted clarification or know if there was a specific type of ingredient that needed to be purchased and make the adjustments as I was shopping.
One of best parts of having recipes available through the web, computer, or mobile device is the access to them from anywhere. For the recipes we use all the time, we can add them to the notebook. An advantage of having them with us is we can plan a menu on the go and can quickly reference the recipe and add ingredients to our shopping list even when we are not home.
