Select Recipes

Simplify meal planning & grocery shopping by compiling sets of recipes and their ingredients in advance! This is step 2 of 7 in the 2-Week Meal Planning series.


Step #2: Select recipes

Avoid the 6am "now what am I going to make for breakfast!?" Plan ahead!

Equipped with your cookbooks you gathered in Step 1: Find Recipes, you're ready to select potentials for your meal plan.

Follow along and write selected recipe names on piece of scrap paper. These aren't necessarily final, so choose as many as you'd like.

note: As an example throughout this 2-Week Meal Planning series, I'll plan 2 weeks of healthy breakfasts.

Family Cookbook

I start by scanning recipe titles in relevant sections from my family cookbook. It’s a three-ring binder, so I can pull out recipes or just note the names.

Flipping past the breakfast tab, I find pancakes, oatmeals, and other warm dishes. They worked great during the winter, but I'm ready for something different.

I pull the whole wheat carrot cake muffins and zucchini-carrot muffins from the next tab, and grab the banana bread from the bread section.

Real Cookbooks

I know them well, so I don't actually look through them, but I write down "beignets," an Artisan Bread in Five recipe which will probably be our non-healthy, sweet treat for the two weeks (I generally allow one per plan).

Delicious Cookbook

I go to my Delicious Cookbook’s breakfast section and click on the “healthy” tag to only see those bookmarks. I open recipes that sound promising in new tabs. Though at this stage I’m mostly browsing, I do avoid those tagged with fruits that are now out of season. Fresh ingredient overlap is also nice, and I try to maintain a little variety.

We eat out two breakfasts a week (strange, I know, since we don’t eat any other meals out, but South Chinese rice noodles on market days are too good to miss!), so I’m looking for at least 10 recipes.

...and you?

Keep your list of recipes you might like to try for Step #3 - Choose Recipes. Keep the healthy breakfast ideas coming... I'm loving all the ideas so far.