Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Grocery lists—with a side of help with recipes!

Making a shopping list can feel like part of the ultimate Sisyphean task—"didn’t we just do this the other day?“ So any ease is welcome!

This week’s tip is twofold: first, wohler shares an easy method for adding (and re-adding) what you need to shop for.

I have a single Shopping list with a bazillion completed items. I prepare my shopping list in two steps.

1. I first view all of the completed items. The items you buy every week will be at the top. You can unselect those quickly.

2. For the items that might be more buried, I’d like to be able to use the browser search function to find items in that same view, but that doesn’t work. Until that is implemented, use the search function, switch to the completed view, and uncomplete the desired items.

Then I go shopping and complete the items, which will be saved for another day.

Then, raymond.bergmark shares some inspiration for folks with Pro for generating a list based on recipes.

Based on the very clever and yet simple idea posted by Wohler, I added some functionality to their setup. If you have a Pro membership, you can even add recipes to your shopping list!

It’s based on one regular list and two Smart Lists.

The regular list is the Shopping list, where everything you might want to buy at some point is added. After you add items, mark them as complete.

Typical items:
[Dairy] Milk
[Fruit] Bananas

The [text in square brackets] makes it easier later, see below.

If you want, you can add (static) information about the number of units/weight etc. To add the items you want to buy, just incomplete them.

This list also includes all your recipes (for Pro members):

Example:
Spaghetti with meat sauce tag:recipe
Ingredients are listed as sub-tasks, example:
• [Meat & deli] Ground beef (400 g)
• [Pasta & rice] Spaghetti (300 g)
• [Vegetables] Onions (2)
The sub-tasks should not be tagged with recipe!

The two Smart Lists are:

Recipes (search: list:"Shopping list” AND tag:recipe) - here you decide the menu, just chose which meals you want to cook.
By incompleting meals, all their ingredients are added to the next Smart List:

To buy (search: list:“Shopping list” NOT tag:recipe) - shows all items you need to buy, either from recipes or from items you’ve chosen from the shopping list. The list is easy to use if you sort by task name. The reason for the NOT tag:recipe part of the search is to show the ingredients (sub-tasks), not the meal (task).
Just complete tasks until you’re done.

It’s probably easier to add all the items to your shopping list on a computer, including all relevant recipes. To decide what to buy, this can easily be done on a mobile device.

Either way, easier lists means easier shopping means easier meals means easier dishes, right? 😅

Thanks for sharing your tips, wohler and raymond.bergmark! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winners 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.