5 Steps to Organize Pinterest for Easy Meal Planning
Pinterest might just be the best thing since sliced bread. It’s such an amazing tool for so many different purposes, recipe sharing, DIY projects, home decor, parenting advice, the list goes on and on. One of the most helpful ways that I use Pinterest is for meal planning and organizing recipes that I love.
Before Pinterest, people would collect cook books that contained only a handful of recipes they actually liked, cut out recipes from the newspaper, or keep index cards with recipes written on them. Talk about an unorganized mess! My grandma has stacks and stacks of recipes in paper form and it makes it really hard to keep track of everything and find the recipes you want, but there just wasn’t a better way to do things back in the day. Well Pinterest has changed everything!
I know a lot of folks still have a hard time keeping recipes organized and fall into the trap of having a ton of recipes pinned that they will never actually try. So I wanted to share how I organize my Pinterest boards to make my meal planning process super easy.
1. Create your boards: I have five boards dedicated to recipes alone. Recipes I Want to Try, Breakfast Recipes I Love, Dinner Recipes I Love, Snack and Side Recipes I Love, Dessert Recipes I Love.
2. Pick some new recipes to try each week: When I’m researching recipes in Pinterest and I come across one that looks good, I add it to my board for “Recipes I Want to Try”. Then when I am going through my Meal Planning Process, I go to this board and pick a couple of new recipes I want to make for the week. Usually I will try to make one or two new recipes a week to keep dinner time interesting.
3. Move the recipe to a “keep” board or delete it: Once I have made the recipe, I go back into the “Recipes I Want to Try” board and move the pin for that recipe to my “Dinner Recipes I Love” board (or breakfast, snack, dessert depending on the type of recipe) or delete the recipe if I didn’t like it.
4. Add recipe modifications to the pin description: I will add any recipe modifications I made to the pin description so I have that all documented when I make the recipe again in the future.
5. Use the boards to pick recipes and create your grocery list each week for meal planning: Once I have collected a bunch of recipes in each board, I can very easily go into the board and find the recipes I want to make for the upcoming week, jot down the groceries I need to buy for each recipe, and figure out what meal prep I need to do ahead of time.
I go over my process in more detail in my 3 Step Easy Meal Planning Process post if you need additional help with meal planning.
