Meal planning definitely saves you time and money every week but it’s so easy to get a bit stuck in a rut with your meals – and that’s when it’s easy to fall off the meal planning wagon. Here’s how I try and stop that from happening by using Pinterest for meal planning!
Pinterest is genuinely THE best place for food inspiration because there are (and I’m totally guessing here) millions of recipes shared by real people with real photos taken in their own kitchen. These aren’t meals made by professional cooks and photographed with all the fancy lights and camera accessories that a professional photographer uses when they do food photography.
What I’m trying to say is that the majority of recipes on Pinterest are achievable for those with even the most basic skills (like me) which is why it’s my go-to when it comes to meal planning.
I have my recipe bank already written up so I’ll always tend to start with that when I sit down to write my meal plan and I’ll usually make up four or five days’ worth of meals from that and from what I already have in the freezer batch cooked meals. That’ll usually leave two or three nights to fill.
One will be a quick meal generally as there’ll usually be a night when we’re needing to eat at different times for one reason or another so that will tend to be a random soup and toasties, scrambled egg on toast or even a chicken nuggets and fries freezer kind of meal.
That leaves one or two meals unaccounted for which is where Pinterest comes in!
I use Pinterest for meal planning in three ways – the first one involves a general search using a phrase like ‘family meals’ which always brings up hundreds and hundreds of recipe ideas. There are then options to filter the pins to various specific diets like vegetarian, vegan, keto and also to narrow it down to budget, quick and child friendly so you can really narrow down what you see.
I love just scrolling through for inspiration every now and again and I save any that stand out to my own board so when it comes to writing my meal plan, I can just head to my board and choose what I want to add to my plan for that week.
You’ll see from the image above that a lot of the meals are US recipes so I do sometimes have to adapt the recipe and substitute some of the ingredients but it’s never a big issue so don’t let that put you off at all.
The second way that I use Pinterest is to just search for my main ingredients. So if I have chicken and green peppers in to use up then I’ll just search ‘chicken green pepper’ to see what kind of recipes I could cook with them.
I’ll usually choose one that I like to add to my meal plan and I’ll Pin that and any others that I like the look of to my own board so I don’t lose track of them for the future.
The third and final way that I use Pinterest for meal planning is to search by my method of cooking because I sometimes want a lazy easy slow cooker meal or I want to make soup in the soupmaker and more recently, I’ve been trying to cook more in the Instant Pot to teach myself how to use it a bit more.
There are so many ideas out there that even just choosing one a week to try will stop you from getting stuck in a meal planning rut. And lots of the recipes you try might end up in your recipe bank list and become family favourites for the future!
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Do your future self a favour – Pin ‘How I use Pinterest for Meal Planning’ for later:
