How Does She Do It: Signing Up and Chickpea Curry

Those of you that know me well, or even just slightly well, know that cooking IS NOT my strong suit. I don't like it and I also don't like grocery shopping.

However, it has finally occurred to me that I am going to have to change this about myself, especially with a little Fuest on the horizon.

With a bit of motivation and a little luck, I googled "menu planner". Guess what I stumbled upon? HowDoesSheDoIt.com I'm so excited I could cry.

You can plan your weekly menu online. You can pick from tons of recipes, add your own, or even customize ones that you find and like. Then you assign the recipes to whatever meal of the day you'd like, and plan out your week.

THEN...

You hit "shopping list" and this crazy amazing thing happens: it pulls all your ingredients from all your recipes for the week and CATEGORIZES them according to areas in the grocery store (ie. produce, dairy, breads, etc.) so that when you're shopping you're not steering your cart like a lunatic trying to find every random ingredient in the five cookbooks you have open at once.

This is mine this week:

Another cool thing is that you can add "bagged lunch" to the menu everyday for lunch if you're a packer and take mostly the same things every week. Andy packs his lunch and now I can add "Andy's packed lunch" on the menu every day and it will automatically add all the stuff for his lunch on my shopping list.

You can also print out a menu for your fridge so the little bambinos and the hubs know what's on the menu for the week.

I'm normally not a "look, this website makes my life so much easier!" person, but this one so far seems to really light a fire under my anti-cooking butt.

So, tonight was night #1. Chickpea Curry:

Source

Verdict:
Pretty simple to make.
Good flavor.
Not too spicy.
Perfect amount for two people.
Very healthy.
Andy (and I) liked it.

Hooray!

The menu on my fridge tells me that tomorrow night's dinner is Cowboy Casserole. Oh boy!

P.S. I know it probably sounds like I was paid or perked to write this, but I wasn't. I promise. But maybe I should be... ha! So far I love it. We'll see what tomorrow brings!