Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Cooking with Remember The Milk
Cooking is a multifaceted job that requires equal parts planning, organization, and work. (Simmer for one week, season as needed.)
This week’s thorough tip comes from brumley, who walks us through their whole process from planning and shopping to cooking and ongoing organization.
I love to cook and RTM has helped me a great deal. I have three lists I use (dinner, grocery, pantry).
The Dinner List
Like erlang, I also have a “dinner” list. I put all the dishes I have made before or would like to make. Each dish is tagged with #cuisine and #course but no due date.
Because I have hundreds of tags, all my food-related tags are prefixed with an underscore _ so they are separated from my work tags.
Cuisine is prefixed with +
+italian
+mexican
+asian
Course is prefixed with -
-appetizer
-side
-main
-dessert
Later, the dish is used to tag ingredients in my grocery list:
_tortilla soup
_paella
_tuscan chicken
I use the url to add a link to any YouTube clip related to preparation, or if not available, to a webpage.
I add several notes:
1. Ingredients
2. Preparation
3. Pairings (wine, side dishes, etc)
4. Leftover Ideas (grilled chicken –> chicken Caesar salad –> buffalo chicken wraps –> chicken and pesto pizza –> fajitas)
5. Search tags to recall grocery list i.e., tag:_paella AND status:completed
When I am ready to plan, I search by cuisine and give the courses a due date I plan to make the dish. When done, I remove the due date.
The Grocery List
I have the items I usually buy at my local store in an Excel spreadsheet list. In Excel, I select the items I want to buy, filter the list, and email the list to RTM.
My spreadsheet is set up like this:
Column 1 - Store section
Column 2 - Frequency (so I can filter list to hide infrequent items)
Column 3-5 - Sorting categories (Produce-Fruit-Citrus, Produce-Vegetable-Root)
Column 6 - The name I want to see in my list i.e., Orange or Potato
Column 7 - Descriptive info i.e., Navel or Yukon Gold
Column 8 - Qty
Column 9 - a formula to convert the store section into an hour (necessary to reset the item count in column 10 when section changes)
Column 10 - a formula to convert the item in the section into a minute (increments until section changes then starts back at 1)
I have my list sorted by due date. The due date is Today Section:Item. I know I could have put them as a prefix, but I like the cleanness of this method.
Column 11 - a formula to build the Smart Add line. It concates Column 6, Column 7 and adds due date in the form of ^Today at section;item. The formula looks at the header in column 8 and if it is more than three characters, it assumes this is an ingredient list for a particular dish and adds the dish tag i.e., _tortillasoup to the line.
When completed, I select the drop down button on the autofiltered list in the Qty column and select non-blanks. I then select the items in column 10, copy and paste into an email to send to my RTM Grocery List.
A completed line might look like this:
Potatoes, Yukon Gold #_potatoeslyonaise ^Today at 01:01
Onions, Sweet #_potatoeslyonaise ^Today at 01:02
Butter, unsalted #_potatoeslyonaise ^Today at 15:01
Once in RTM, I can always go to my note for the dish in my dinner list and copy and paste the search string to pull up the shopping list then select and uncomplete.
For things I normally keep stocked in my pantry and fridge, I selected the items in my Excel list and emailed to another list tagged with and called Pantry. Periodically, I will inventory the pantry. When things get low, I change the priority to 3, then 2, then 1. I check this list at the grocery store to see if I need to replenish.
Thanks for sharing this tip, brumley! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.
