Simplify meal planning & grocery shopping by compiling sets of recipes and their ingredients in advance! This is step 1 in the 2-Week Meal Planning series.

Step #1: Find recipes

Good recipes aren't hard to find... as long as you start looking before it's time to start cooking!

I have three "cookbooks" I go to:

1) our family cookbook
2) our five published cookbooks
3) my delicious cookbook

In step 2 I'll tell you how I decide which recipes to even consider, but for now, I want to share where my recipes come from.

Family Cookbook

Handwritten recipes and those I print that we like are filed in a three-ring binder under handmade tabs:

breakfast * muffins * bread * drinks * soup & slow cooker * stir-fry * poultry * meat * other main * veggies & sides * sweets

Your categories may be different based on what you cook more and less, but organizing your recipes in a similar style should help you find them easily.

Real Cookbooks

You can read more about our five cookbooks in a previous post. Obviously, you'll just want to pull out whatever cookbooks you have.

Delicious Cookbook

I tag links to all the recipes I find online in delicious. Make sure your tags are useful! I tag by:

* meal: breakfast, lunch, dinner
* part: side, main, drink
* type: muffin, pancake, granola
* nutrition: grain, veggie, dairy
* ingredient: banana, carrot, butter
* trait: sweet, healthy, quick

...and you?

I need a little help. Can you share a healthy breakfast recipe? Link to or write it in the comments! You can also tag it "for:simplyla" on delicious, which will make sure it gets into my delicious cookbook.

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