Sharing recipes, new menu feature

In a comment on some of the recipe posts last week, Tara mentioned that she is looking at doing some meal planning. That got me thinking ...

I'm trying to do menu planning, too. Last week, I set up a calendar on Google Calendar to help me plan our meals. Here are some of the perks as I see them:

* I already use Google Calendar to organize other aspects of my life. I have separate calendars for my personal schedule, birthdays, and family events, so adding a menu calendar seemed like a good idea.

* Google Calendar emails me every morning to remind me of the day's agenda. I now have it set up to include menu plans in that email.

* Google Calendar makes it easy to assign meals to specific days, but also to move those meals around as needed.

* With Google Calendars, you can share calendars with friends and family so they can see agenda items or they can even add items to the agenda, if you give them permission.

Originally, I just thought about sending Tara a link so she can view the calendar. But when I started thinking about it, I wondered if it was possible to share my calendar more broadly, maybe even on the blog. And, after a bit of fiddling around, I figured out how to do it. Now, if you scroll down to the bottom of the blog, you will see a copy of our menu plans via Google Calendar. The calendar is in "agenda" form, so you can see what meal is planned for each day.

Here are a few tips:

* If you click on the orange text with the name of the meal, it will expand the information about that agenda item. For most recipes, I am trying out something I've found online; in cases when I had the recipe in digital form, I've pasted the recipe in the description. Either way, you now have a link to the recipe or the recipe itself.

* In the expanded mode, you will also see a link for "add to my calendar." If you use Google Calendar and you click on that link, it will let you copy the information from my calendar onto your calendar.

* You can also view the calendar on a day, week, or month view. The way I have things set up right now, it other views don't fit in the window quite as well, but you can change the view if you wish.

I think that's it for now. Please feel free to email (sarahlea at gmail) or post comments with questions. If you already use Google Calendar and would like me to share my menu calendar, let me know and I'll invite you to view it. This is probably silly, but I'm pretty excited to see how this experiment will work and what y'all think of it.