Cooking Under Quarantine: Meal Prep Goes Digital

If you are anything like me, then you've probably found yourself complaining multiple times about how dry your hands are from all of the dish washing. Why? Because the stay-at-home mandates have now forced you to cook three meals a day, every day, for the foreseeable future. And while getting creative and trying out new recipes (have you baked your first loaf of bread yet?) is a welcome reprieve from the monotony of most days, it can also become a stressful undertaking that only multiplies with the more mouths you have to feed.

Luckily−much like everything else these days−cooking has gone digital. You don't have to pore over countless books and old journals to find the recipes you need. And just like finding a recipe has gotten easier, so has planning to prepare it.

Organization is key to removing unnecessary stress from your life. Instead of spending time looking up recipes and finding out what ingredients you have available for every meal, spend an hour on the weekend (perhaps a quiet Sunday morning) planning out all of your meals for the rest of the week with a little help from these tools.

Cookspiration

Cookspiration has a nifty menu planner tool that lets you pick a nutritional goal such as gluten-free, dairy-free, kid-friendly, etc. and load a week's worth of meals that you can easily switch out, if you wish.

After you're satisfied with the meal options, the app will automatically generate a shopping list that you can download or print out so you'll have exactly what you need for a week's worth of meals. The best part is that it is all completely free, and stocked with other great resources for eating on a budget, sample meals for young children, and anything else you may have a question about when it comes to nutrition.If you're a tech-savvy parent who enjoys keeping everything on their phone instead, there's an app for that too.

Mealime

Mealime is a free app available on both Android and iOS that caters to your needs and restrictions (allergies, dislikes) and provides you with hundreds of recipes. Just like Cookspiration, it lets you plan out an entire week's worth of meals through the app, where you can keep track of a grocery list all in one place. It will even set up a reminder for a weekly planning session, so you're not stuck scrambling for ideas on Monday night.

As seen on Mealime's website

Quick Tips

Lastly, if there is anything that I've learned during my exploratory culinary experience, is that I prefer to spend more of my time doing it rather than reading about it. So do yourself a favour and install the free Recipe Filter extension on your Chrome browser. It will bypass all those background stories and bring up what you really want out of that blog article−the recipe.

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