Yummy Soup

I didn't meal plan for the first few years of our marriage and dinner was always kind of a crazy and stressful time of the day. Then someone clued me into choosing what you're going to eat for the week and making a grocery shopping list off of those recipes. Bingo!! My life is SO much more simpler because of this and I've been doing this for over 5 years now; the few (and I mean very few) weeks I don't menu plan for whatever reason, it always adds so much more stress to my life.

I also really love reading food blogs. I don't want to get stuck in a rut in my cooking and am always trying to balance perfecting old recipes and trying new ones. There are some really great food blogs out there that I have greatly benefited finding new recipes from.

But how to combine both of these loves? Meal planning and food blogs? I was struggling in this area for a while because all of my recipes used to be typed and printed out in a binder that I kept in my kitchen. But when I wanted to incorporate recipes I found off the internet, it was difficult to keep organized.

Enter YUMMY SOUP. It is a software that I bought for my Mac Computer over a year ago. It holds all of my recipes in it. Yes, I manually entered all of my old recipes from the recipe notebook into it. But I did do it slowly and it is super easy to add recipes. But I was also able to import all of the recipes I had been collecting all over the internet into this program. In just a few seconds and clicks of the mouse, a recipe can be imported from anywhere on the internet. AWESOME!!

And it also has a meal planning feature. There is a calendar that you can choose to appear at the bottom of the screen. So I drag the recipes I'm cooking for the week down onto the calendar and voila! Instant meal planning and instant organization. I am in heaven!! Just wanted to tell all of you about this software in case you might find it to be helpful for you. I purchased it from the Mac Store online for $20? Super cheap. And super worth it. Here's some screen shots of this application...

Here you can see the categories on the left side. Customizable. And the recipe is in the center. Complete with pictures, which I love. Font sizes, types, and pretty much everything about the appearance of the recipe is customizable.

Here you can see the calendar/weekly planning aspect of the software. You can just drag what recipe you're making for each day down to the day you're going to make it. LOVE this feature!!!

An added bonus? For those of you with iPads, it just came out with an app for that. So you can take your recipes anywhere with you! LOVE this!!