Thursday, January 19, 2012

How to use Cozi Online Calendar for Meal Planning

my new years resolution for 2012 is to simplify.
in every sense of the word.
i am focused on getting rid of clutter.
streamlining tasks is another way of removing clutter and simplifying.
i recently found Cozi, an online family calendar.

  • you can coordinate and share the calendar with all the members of the household.
  • get email reminders sent to specified family members.
  • use the iPhone app for Cozi on the go.

however, my favorite Cozi feature is their menu planner!

once you sign up for Cozi all you have to do is add the "add meals" button to your browser toolbar.
then when you are on pinterest, martha stewart, simply recipes; etc all you have to do is click the "add meals" button and that recipe will be added to your "recipe box" on Cozi.

simply drag meals to your calendar to plan the week or month.

as you can see above the blue ones are links to recipes and the black ones i typed in - i can type in "pizza" - no need for a recipe, but this way i can still plan my week :)


click "add ingredients to Cozi shopping list" and the ingredients for the recipe are now added on your Cozi shopping list! (which btw can be accessed from your iPhone at the grocery store because it's always automatically synchronized!!!)
i open the recipe before dinner to look through the directions and either print it out or email it to my iPhone to bring to the kitchen for cooking :)

you can write notes on each recipe in your recipe box to classify it as a family favorite or add tags to make it easy to organize and look up quickly. i added about 30 yummy recipes to Cozi in about 20 minutes of surfing recipes online.

see? simplify. more time for the things in life that are important to me.
what do you think?
what do you currently use?
xoxo,

5 comments:

  1. oh my gosh this looks great. i always just resort to flipping through my saved recipes each week, but I really think this would help me up my cooking game ;) Thanks so much for sharing!

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  2. I finally have a system down that I like. I have all my recipes in a binder grouped by category (beef, non-beef entrees, side dishes and desserts) plus all the recipes I want to try in the pocket in the back. Each week, I pull out one new recipe, two beef recipes (we raise beef, so it's the cheapest option), one non-beef, and one side dish (we normally just have steamed veggies or cut up fruit, so an actual prepared side is a once-a-week treat). I make one or two desserts each month. I choose from only the first few recipes in a section, so it's not so overwhelming, and after I've made them, they go in the back of their section, so they rotate through.
    I don't plan a specific meal for each day, just put the list on the fridge, and I choose what we feel like having that day. I also only plan 3-4 meals each week. There's only two of us, so we eat leftovers on the other days or eat a meal from the freezer (I like to always have a couple on hand).

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  3. holy heck! I have Cozi but didn't know I could do all of that! We are tring something new at our house by sitting down as a family and menu planning for the upcoming week. I get a ton of my recipes from Pinterest, so this has just excited me beyond belief! Thanks for showing me how I can use Cozi to make my life that much more simple!

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  4. THIS is amazing. AHMAZING!! I love Cozi but I did not know I could do this with it. Awesome!! :) Thanks so much for sharing!

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