One of the biggest time sinks in the everyday life is the wondering of “what should we eat today…”. Especially when you don’t want to plan the whole week ahead, you end up going to the grocery store many times a week. I only wish there was a system so that you can input recipes, pick the week’s menu from them, and generate a shopping list for the whole week with one button…
I was looking for a system like this for several days, and it all fell apart either because the system couldn’t sum up ingredients from several recipes, or you were stuck with one predefined recipe bank. Because your granny’s recipes are at least as good as those of avocado_lover93, I couldn’t accept a system that doesn’t allow your own recipes.
So, I lost it and decided to do our own Excel for this purpose.
Using it is relatively straightforward:
- Download the excel file in this folder, open it, and allow macros.
- Input names of the recipes and the necessary ingredients on the worksheet “Recipes”. Attention: Include ingredients in the format “amount unit ingredient”, meaning “400 g potatoes” or “1 packet bacon”, so that the list generator understands the amounts. Spaces between terms are critical here!
- Plan your weekly menu by choosing the appropriate weekly menus on the worksheet ”Menuplan” by naming the weeks, and adding included recipes by their name in the columns. A weekly menuplan can include 0-7 recipes.
- Choose the menu plan for the current week on the worksheet “Grocery list” by filling in that menu plan’s name in the cell B2.
- Press “Create grocery list”.
- The grocery list will be automatically generated at the right side of the page!
If you use Wunderlist as a shopping list, as an added bonus you can paste the shopping list to your Wunderlist with this app: http://wunderlist-parser.herokuapp.com
If you use Todoist, then you can just copy-paste the shopping list to your app, and it works as it is 🙂