Meal planning software saves you time and money, and helps you eat healthier too!

If you are like me and have recipes scattered everywhere, you’ll like this meal planning software I just found on Amazon.com.  It’s called Living Cookbook 2008 and not only will it help you organize your recipes, but it will help you do your meal planning and your grocery shopping. Sounds good to me!

Living Cookbook 2008 is the latest version of the award-winning recipe software from Radium Technologies (update: just released… Living Cookbook 2011!).

Use Living Cookbook to organize recipes, plan meals, create menus, calculate nutrition information, create shopping lists, publish cookbooks, export, e-mail and much more.

Living Cookbook 2008 is an award-winning recipe management and meal planning software, designed to help you:

- organize recipes
– plan meals
– create menus
– calculate nutrition information
– create shopping lists
– publish cookbooks
– and much more!

Manage over 1,000 Recipes with Living Cookbook meal planning software!

If that’s not enough, the Living Cookbook meal planning software comes with more than 1,000 recipes, and thousands more are available online. Living Cookbook lets you type in your recipes, scan them in or copy them from the Internet, making entering your recipes quick and easy.

The meal planning calendar lets you drag and drop your recipes onto the calendar. You can view your meal plans by day, week or month. Creating a shopping list for a meal plan is as simple as clicking on the appropriate days and selecting “Add to Grocery List” from the Action menu.

Meal Planning Software makes dieting and counting calories much easier!

If you’re dieting or just trying to eat healthier, Living Cookbook lets you calculate nutrition for any recipe, ingredient, menu or meal plan. You can customize your display to show over 150 different nutrients including calories, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and more. You can even calculate Weight Watchers Points.

One of my favorite features – and the one that saves me the most time – is the shopping list creator. Living Cookbook can create shopping lists organized by grocery aisle. Just add your ingredients, recipes, menus and meal plans and the software will do the rest. Also, if you enter the prices of your most commonly shopped-for ingredients, Living Cookbook meal planning software can calculate the total cost of your grocery list as well as subtotals for each store – very cool!

Meal Planning Software Update:

Living Cookbook has updated their software; grab your copy of Living Cookbook 2011 today!

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

My Favorite Meal Planning Software – Living Cookbook 2011

Yup, not a mystery — my more usual practice. A cookbook. Specifically, Weight Watchers in 20 minutes.

As I know what I like, ingredients-wise, and what I don’t, I scanned the list, first. Anything with smoked salmon, cilantro, or scallops, for example, was immediately eliminated.

Since I’m not on the WeightWatchers points program, I’m on a high protein/low carb program, first I’d recalculate the carbs by subtracting the fiber carbs (good ones) from the carb count given. Anything with a huge (my view) carb count for one meal, got immediately eliminated.

Anything that required a food processor or a microwave got eliminated. The time saved using the food processor is blasted by the time it takes to clean them, in my opinion. Cooking with a microwave nearly always eliminates any nutritional value of the food.

Out of the 31 recipes in “Welcome the Morning,” I found six recipes that sound scrumptious and that I’m likely to make. There are 8 recipes in “It’s Noon … Time to Eat” that sound yummy. Two of which, especially so.

14 new recipes – a successful harvest.

Some of the recipe pages with reject recipes on both sides, I just tore out and tossed. Others, I just marked with a line through them.

Since the Chapter recipe list does not have page numbers, I marked my winners with their page numbers.

I think I’m going to use Tombo Correction Tape (white-out) over all the rejected recipe titles. That way, all I’ll see are my choices.

It’s likely that I’ll tear out the winners and add them to my favorite recipe binders for ease in meal planning.

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For today, it is enough to have identified my winning recipes in two chapters.

KT’s Chapter 1 Picks:
27 Denver Omelette
28 Provencal Vegetable Omelette
29 Potato and Green Pepper Frittata
30 Crab and Chive Frittata
36 Mixed Veggie Egg Foo Yong
42 Turkey, Potato, and Sage Patties

KT’s Chapter 2 Picks:
48 Bartlett Pear and Ham Salad
52 Santa Fe Roasted Chicken Salad
56 Asparagus-Shrimp Salad
60 Roast Beef and Watercress Sandwiches
64 Warm Caesar Chicken Sandwiches
66 Soy-Glazed Fresh Tuna Sandwiches
78 Kiebasa and Black Bean Soup
81 Corn and Crab Chowder
82 Tomato-Basil Soup

That may sound like a lot of work to you. To me, it was delightful and means I’ll actually use the recipes in the book more than if I didn’t go through this analytical process.

I do the same with recipes found in newspapers and magazines. There, though, my first concern is: how long will it take to make this? More than a half hour, and I’m happy to have such things prepared by a master chef in a restaurant, thank you very much!

Copyright © 2009 Kathleen Tumpane. All rights reserved.

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Feng Shui Designer, Teacher, and Coach, Kathleen Tumpane ASID, is the author and creator of Elemenza Weekly, her FREE weekly ezine which includes her renowned column ‘Simply Feng Shui’ rich in Feng Shui Design and Lifestyle tips to help you design your home and office rich in elegant and subtle feng shui power that helps you live and work in balance. Visit http://www.elemenza.com to learn more.

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

How to use a Cookbook for Easier Menu Planning

1. The first thing is of course how to cook for a diabetic in the healthiest possible way and without compromising much on palatability. There is an intentional effort to keep the recipes tasty but without the ingredients that diabetic persons must abhor.

2. The focus of such tips is on individual meals rather than the entire diet. Some of these tips will deal with diabetic breakfasts, some with diabetic lunches and dinners while some will be about diabetic snacks. This way it helps to focus on each part of the diabetic menu.

3. There is always a section on salads and soups in all favorite foods. This is the most important section because good soups and salads can help a diabetic person to eat more.

4. There are several substitute foods mentioned in a diabetes cooking. You can learn tips on switching over from an unhealthy food to a healthier one. This helps you to keep your diabetic menu as close to the menu you had before you were diagnosed with the condition.

5. Essential guide to planning, shopping and cooking for diabetes will not want you to completely eliminate sugars and starches from your diet. But through right calculations, you will be able to include them in your diabetic menu and still stay above healthy limits.

6. The best part of a good diabetic cooking is the information provided on the nutritional value of each food, including carbohydrate content and calorie count. This helps to monitor the entire food pattern.

7. Diabetes diet recipes tell whether it is advisable to stay with some kind of fad diet or not. You may know of various diets that are engineered for people with diabetes conditions; but cookbooks will help dispel the myths about most diets and let you know whether you should stick with them.

8. These recipes will never want you to cook larger portions of foods, because among other things, large food portions are quite detrimental to a diabetic. You will learn how to cook little and still manage appetite control.

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

Things That You Can Learn From A Diabetic Cookbook

Here’s a cookbook perfect for budget conscious meal planners…

If you want to save a lot of money on your grocery bills, yet still serve delicious and nutritious meals, this cookbook is for you!

All of the recipes in this book were contributed by Nutrition Educators with your needs in mind. You’ll find breakfast dishes for as little as 4 cents per serving, and main dishes featuring meat for as little as 51 cents per serving.

With hundreds of recipes, you’ll find everything from breakfast; main dishes with meat, poultry, fish and a secti (more…)

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

The Tight Budget Cookbook

You don’t have to order take out every time you don’t feel like cooking–now there’s an easier way to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner (not to mention dessert) right at your fingertips!

The Everything Meals for a Month Cookbook is the perfect tool to help you save time in the kitchen (and money in your wallet!) with practical shopping tips and food handling tricks for buying and cooking in bulk.

Learn how to plan your menu, assemble the ingredients, and store and freeze a month’s (more…)

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

The Everything Meals For A Month Cookbook

There are two sites that I love browsing for dinner ideas and for new recipes.  They are:

AllRecipes.com and
Meals.com

In addition to thousands of recipes, these sites also offer articles and tips on cooking, cooking on a budget, entertaining, and eating healthier.

What are your favorite recipe sites?

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

Where To Find Recipes