How to Effectively Meal Plan with Evernote

Every person in the world struggles with the age-old question of “What do you want to eat today?” It’s a biological requirement that we have to find sustenance, and it can be exhausting trying to come up with a meal after keeping your kids entertained all day. This lack of willpower is why restaurants and now companies like DoorDash exist because it’s so hard to answer that question every day! At the Killebrew Krewe household, we frequented the food delivery sites when the boys were born. The food budget exploded overnight, and we knew that we eventually needed to reign that back in.

As a typical millennial, I don’t have the classic recipe book filled with magazine clippings and notes hand-written by my great-great-grandmother. I have the internet. It has every single recipe that you can think of. Trust me. Even that super-secret recipe handed down for generations is online somewhere. But when it comes time to create a weekly meal plan, it is nice to have a collection of favorites the thumb through. The Killebrew Krewe has its favorites, but they were stored all around our iPhone notes, photos app, or text messages from our parents sending us the recipe.

It didn’t take long for us to realize that if we wanted to get serious, we needed to find a way to store our favorite and recurring recipes in an easily accessible manner. Mark (the software nerd he is) came up with a couple of fantastic solutions. My favorite was utilizing an Evernote account as a recipe list, weekly meal planner, and grocery shopping list.

Recipe List

The first step was documenting all of the recipes that we had already utilized. Evernote has a great feature where it creates a “simplified” web clip from a website. It breaks it down to the actual article, with no side menus, ads, or related articles. It grabs the recipes from the website and creates them into an editable note on your Evernote account. The editable part is super important. How do you make the recipe your own if you can remember that thing you changed?

We grab a photo and throw it into a table, add some tags to describe the ingredients and final product, and boom. We’ve got a searchable photo library for recipe ideas. It takes a lot of front-loaded work to compile everything, but it’s worth it. Whenever we find a new recipe that we want to try, we add it to Evernote to further tag and categorize. This system makes it easy to use our food at home by searching for that item, or building a weekly meal plan is a breeze.

Weekly Meal Plan

Every Saturday, on the boy’s first nap, we knock out a meal plan for the week. We essentially come up with 5-8 meals (we count on many leftovers) for the week. Mark usually picks the meals; sorry, I’m the worst and can never decide what to eat even when we are meal planning :). He peruses the recipe list, looking through the photos helps so much, and usually searches for a new recipe or two to add to the recipe list. Then it’s my turn to step in.

Grocery List

Mark sucks at building the grocery list from there. We’ve had to make up our twist to a recipe multiple times because he forgot a key ingredient. That way, we have a list of things to order for our grocery delivery. Yes, we are avid grocery delivery advocates. Between COVID and the boys being born, it was a no-brainer. We also use Butcher Box for the meat. It helps us add variety to our meals by including some specialty cuts. It keeps us from just eating chicken breasts and ground beef. Butcher Box offers some of the best grass-fed

Meal planning and developing a digital cookbook takes a lot of front-loaded energy but its so worth it once you have it. It allows our family to be more intentional with our meals. The better we eat, the better we feel. The easier it is to get quality meals into our week, the easier it is to resist the temptation of just getting food delivered.