With the festive season fast approaching, we thought we’d share with you a little known way of using MeisterTask to keep organized with an expert (and beautiful!) recipe planner.
Between drinks receptions, decadent three course dinners and show-stopping deserts, it can be an absolute minefield trying to make sure you have all the right ingredients, for the right events, at the right time.
With MeisterTask you can gather your recipes, cooking times and shopping lists, all in one place and with the app accessible from your desktop or mobile (even offline), those last-minute supermarket dashes and kitchen frenzies could soon be a thing of the past.
Here are our 6 simple steps to creating your own Holiday Recipe Planner:
1. Create Your Project
First create your Holiday Meal Planner project. You can add a relevant image so it’s easy to identify from your project dashboard.
If you haven’t already, you’ll need to sign up for MeisterTask to do this – you can try the basic level for free.
2. Organize by Food Type
Next, add some structure to your planner by categorizing your recipe sections with the relevant catering groups. For my meal planner I’ll be including:
- Canapés
- Entrées
- Main Courses
- Side Dishes
- Desserts
- Cocktails
- Additional drinks
To add a new section, simply click on the next available column to the right of the existing columns. To edit an existing column, click on the section heading, where you can edit the name, colour coordination and icon, via the dropdown menu.
3. Begin Adding Recipes as Tasks
Create a task per recipe and within the checklist section, list the ingredients you need to buy in order to bake / make / assemble your dish or drink.
It’s also a good idea to include a link to where you can find the full recipe online.
Within each task you’re able to set a due date, so use this feature to create a cooking schedule for the day of each event.
Set the due time to the time you’d need to get the recipe in the oven by, so if you’re aiming to serve your Christmas lunch at 4pm on the 25th December, you could set a reminder to put your roast potatoes in the oven at 3:10 – depending on how crispy you like them 😉
4. Make Sure There’s Something for Everyone
Make sure you’re serving something for everyone by categorizing your recipes with the relevant dietary requirement tags for your guests. These could include:
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
- Alcohol-free
- Includes nuts
- Includes pork
You can then filter by these tags to ensure there’s a suitable dish for your veggie guest or to know which dishes anyone with a nut allergy should be avoiding.
5. Know What You’re Serving and When
You can also use tags to label which event you’ll be serving each dish at, so you can quickly filter by that event when heading to the supermarket or prepping in the morning.
My Holiday Meal Planner includes tags for:
- Neighbor Drinks December 24th
- Dinner December 25th
- Lunch December 26th
- New Years Eve party
- New Years Day Brunch
You can then filter by each event to collate all the recipes you need to prepare for.
6. Make Your Recipe Planner Look Beautiful
From the original online recipes, try to source a photo for each of your dishes. Add these images as attachments to their relevant recipe task, so that you can build your board up to become your very own visual, online recipe book.
You can include recipes you plan to create this year and those which you might see online but want to save for next year. You can also apply the same template all year round to achieve a healthy, balanced diet, naming the sections ‘packed lunches’ and ‘weekday dinners’ for example.
Once built up, your digital recipe board could end up looking something like this:
So those are our 6 simple steps to creating your recipe planner this Holiday – get started now to make sure you can buy the ingredients ahead of your events and let us know how you get on in the comments below!
Create Your Own Recipe Planner
Get Started with MeisterTask