Saturday, December 5, 2009

Saturday Recommendations

I have Wholesome Baby Food on my links list, but I wanted to make a point of featuring it because it has really helped give me some structure with feeding my child when all I was getting when soliciting advice (including from my soon to be ex-pediatrician) were vague notions that I should, in fact, feed him. (Thanks) I am trying to be really careful with his digestive system as my husband and I both have different diseases that relate to the way our bodies process food. No one knows the cause of either of our conditions, but they are thought not to be genetic, so it is likely that the cause is in some way environmental. Maybe there is nothing to be done, and neither condition is particularly life-altering, but like I said I'm trying to be super careful just in case.
Anyway, I really like this website and they give a lot of great tips on how to prepare food, and what food to give your baby at each stage of development. They even have interesting recipes for finger foods for toddlers.

Another tool I've used to help the meal planning run smoothly around here is MacGourmet Deluxe. We got it almost a year ago and it has saved me so much time making weekly grocery lists. Unfortunately, at least when we signed up for it, you have to get the deluxe version to get the grocery list program which is really the best part, but honestly for us it has been totally worth it. I have most of my recipes entered into the program at this point, so instead of having to figure out what I want to make out of then air, I can go look at the recipe list and pull from that into the Weekly Meal Plan option. Once I've done that, I simply click the grocery cart icon and TaDa! grocery list! I don't know if grocery shopping is as drama filled for other as it was for me, but before we had this it used to take me between one and two hours to make a complete grocery list and even then I'd usually either spend too much money on stuff we didn't need, or I'd forget one or two indispensable items and have to go back. Interestingly, even though I usually don't go back and look at the meal plan during the week, actually seeing it in print when I first assemble it seems to make it stick in my head in a more concrete (this is what we're doing) way and really helps me fight the impulse to order in when I'm tired at the end of the day.I don't know if there is a version for the PC, but maybe there are similar programs available out there? If so, I'd definitely recommend looking into it. The program is around $50 which I assume is comparable to most software of this caliber, but I seriously think that we have saved between $200 to $300 a month due to making grocery shopping and meal planning so much easier so it has definitely paid for itself.

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