In my easy meal planning post the other day, I offered 7 tips for making meal planning easier. But if you’re a beginner cook or new to meal planning, you probably need some initial meal ideas to help get your creative juices flowing. Beyond Eating Made Easy’s extensive recipe collection, here are my favorite go-to’s for meal inspiration:
- Great Food Fast cookbook, from Martha Stewart Living’s Everyday Food. This book offers straightforward recipes that don’t take much time or expertise, and nutrition facts are provided for every dish. They also have a new edition of the book, called Fresh Flavor Fast: 250 Easy, Delicious Recipes for Any Time of Day, which I don’t own myself, but imagine is just as helpful a tool.
- Nutritionist Ellie Krieger’s cookbook, So Easy: Luscious Recipes for Every Meal of the Week. Here you’ll find incredibly quick and easy recipes and meal ideas for at home and on-the-go. The food in here is so tasty, you’d never know the book was written by a nutritionist.
- Everyday Food magazine. Many of the recipes that appear in this monthly mag end up in the Great Food Fast cookbook, but in addition to the recipes, the mag offers practical tools like meal plans, shopping lists, and seasonal produce guides that make it so easy to whip something up. Plus, the magazine is tiny, so you can keep a bunch of them on hand without worrying about storage space.
- Eating Well magazine and website. This is one of the best nutritional publications I’ve seen. The recipes are always terrific, and the nutrition articles and info are written by Registered Dietitians and other trusted nutrition scientists. There aren’t many websites or magazines out there that are reliable 100% of the time, so this is a real gem.
- Real Simple magazine. The recipes in this mag usually only call for a handful of ingredients and can be prepared in literally 20 minutes. Plus, the rest of the magazine is fun to read too so it’s a good excuse to be a subscriber.
Have more questions or need more resources? Ask Amelia here!
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