Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Managing recipes and meals

We have two Tips & Tricks Tuesday winners this week! Thanks to RTM users nluoma and jkalvin, who both shared interesting tips for a pretty different, useful way to use the app: managing recipes (and we think Bob might need some help, judging by the pic below–what on earth is he making?!). nluoma starts:

I use RTM to manage my recipes and meals. I enter the recipe name as the task name, and put the recipe on the Notes field. I can use tags to categorize them, and can then browse through my recipes quickly to schedule a week or two of meals at a time and put together my shopping list.

Then, all I have to do is look at today’s schedule to see what’s for dinner. Once the meal is done, I change the due date to never and it’s ready for rescheduling.

jkalvin builds on this tip:

I love this idea! In fact I have had a similar method in mind for a while now (but I have yet to implement it). I myself would use the Notes field to put the recipe instructions (as you do), but have the ingredients as separate tasks tied to the recipes/meals with tags. That way you could semi-automatically generate grocery lists. I imagine the “tagContains” search term would be rather useful in accomplishing this.

What I like about your method is that you consider scheduling of meals; I dare say you could even extend that using the recurring feature. You could create smartlists that display the next X amount of days ahead of you.

Thanks to both nluoma and jkalvin for sharing!

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.