In my continuing posts about my love of the Thermomix (or as I call it “75 Reasons to love Thermomix) this time I turn to the Cookidoo recipe platform, and why it gives you a luxury that money cannot buy: time.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t buy time. It’s a fixed commodity and can’t be traded, we all have a fixed amount of it each day and if we want more of it we need to get smart with what we have.
Each day I only have a certain amount of brain space to use and when I have used that up, well it’s time for another episode of Suits and a large cuppa. So I have been trying to find ways to make my day to day list of things to do easier, smoother and that mean I don’t need to think so much. The first area I focused on was menu planning and food shopping.
When we got our Thermomix a year ago I focused on the functions it had. The ability to chop, mix, whisk, steam, boil, freeze, crush ice etc. What I didn’t really take on board was Cookidoo app that comes with it. Cookidoo is an online menu platform that lets you search for recipes and add them to your profile. The recipes are part of collections and each collection is themed, and available for about £3 for a number of recipes. You then have access to them as when you need them, forever.
It also means that you can then “drag and drop” the recipes into the weekly planner, such as the picture above displays. As many as you want, each day for the upcoming week, fortnight or longer.
That automatically adds all the ingredients to a shopping list which you can then work through, cross off anything you have in the cupboard, or add to your shopping basket when you next hit the supermarket.
It means that on a Sunday afternoon I can sit down with a cup of tea, plan the menu for the week, and have our shopping done and ordered in less than an hour, ready to be delivered on Monday morning. Honestly, it couldn’t be more simple. I had been trying to menu plan for months before, with a pile of recipe books and the problem was I would get all organised, work out what we were having for the week, order it all on line, and then close the books, forgetting what all the ingredients were meant to make. Or I would write a list of meals but then forget which book they were in. It never really worked, no matter how much planning I did.
This though, this does.
Breakfast for this week has been dragged and dropped in less than one minute
All chosen from my online collection of smoothies, followed by the soups for lunch and then weekday dinners taken from various vegetarian collections and recipes:
The entire process took me no more than fifteen minutes and they are all now saved online so I know what we are having each day and don’t need to try and remember which book I was reading through or keep them out all week.
The shopping list was completed automatically as each of those meals was added to the list, meaning I don’t need to think about the ingredients or write a list, leaving my brain free to do something else. I can go through the list removing any items we already have, print it out, and then do an online food shop. From start to finish takes an hour and requires very little thinking at all.
This is a little talked about bonus of the Thermomix but I think we should all be shouting about it so much more because for busy people, it is an absolute life saver.