Picture this: it’s the weekend, and you’re getting ready to do your weekly grocery shopping, so that means it’s time to make your plan of attack (creating a meal plan + shopping list). Even though you do this every week, you still struggle to figure out what to eat for the next 7 days. Everyone’s been there — hell, we’ve been in that situation too. We get it, eating the same meals on rotation gets old really quick, and makes the idea of ordering out very attractive.
So how do you solve the problem? How do you find inspiration and avoid giving your entire paycheque to Skip the Dishes? You could go shopping without a plan, but that means more food waste and more money wasted on random splurge purchases.
While we can’t force you to be inspired, what we can do is provide you with a list of things that we do when to find recipe inspiration. We hope this helps makes meal planning easier!
Make Recipes From Meal Subscription Companies
You don’t have to subscribe to benefit from meal subscription companies! They all have their recipes online which is great for customers considering with company to choose, but also great for finding recipe inspiration. Here are a few companies to check out:
They list the ingredients you need and also include step-by-step instructions (usually with pictures) so it’s super easy to replicate any of their recipes! If you have time to get your own groceries, it’s wayyyy cheaper than subscribing and having groceries delivered to your door.
(Of course, if you’re short on time or want a break from cooking, there’s nothing wrong with subscribing to one! They can take a lot of stress out of your work week.)
Sign Up for Newsletters
There are a lot of cooking blogs out there and there are so many recipes. What do you make? How do you choose? Sometimes you just want to be told, or given a smaller list to choose from.
This is where getting an email in your inbox can help! Many food blogs send curated emails with recipes and tips. Here are a few:
Bon Appétit has three newsletters. Subscribe to them all or the one that tickles your fancy!
The NYT Cooking newsletter is like a love letter. It’s long with lots of text. But Sam Sifton gives you a recipe idea for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Often the recipes are complex, but if you’re looking for a recipe to impress someone or a new challenge, this newsletter is for you.
Go check out your favourite cooking blog and see if they have a newsletter. If they do, subscribe!
📧 Shameless plug: we have a newsletter! It’s not very frequent — we only email you when we come out with a new post. Subscribe, if you want.
Browse Cookbooks
We have a lot of cookbooks. A pile of cookbooks. If you also have a dusty bookshelf of cookbooks that hasn’t been looked at in a while, revisit them! It’s a great place to find recipe inspiration. Take a book and add sticky notes to recipes you want to make. Each week, choose a bookmark and incorporate a new recipe into your meal plan!
Don’t have a library of cookbooks? Ask your Mom. She probably has a ton. Or go to the library — they have cookbooks too! You can also browse cookbooks at a bookstore if you want. We’ve never seen anyone get kicked out of a bookstore for reading a book.
Want access to 56,000+ cookbooks? Check out Kindle Unlimited. (You don’t need a Kindle device, you can download the Kindle app on any device!) Whether you’re looking for low carb, keto, gluten free, or copycat recipes, Kindle Unlimited has cookbooks for everyone.
Here are some examples of cookbooks that you can access:
(Note: These are affiliate links that help us earn a small commission from your purchase. Each purchase supports the blog so we can continue to make content! If you use this link, we really appreciate it!)
Get Inspired on Social Media
Social media is an obvious place to look for recipe inspiration — everyone and their grandma is posting what they ate on Instagram or Facebook. Most food blogs are also promoting themselves on social media, so it’s an obvious place to start.
Pinterest: Pinterest is great because you can create boards to organize your recipe pins. Trying to make #meatlessmonday a thing at your house? Make a vegetarian board! If you don’t want to go through the work of curating your own boards, you can always check out other people’s boards such as this one titled The Most Popular Recipes on Pinterest. (It couldn’t be lying, right?) It only covers a few food bloggers, but it’s a good place to start if you want recipe inspiration NOW.
Reddit: Remember that time where we wrote about our Yeah, we remember. Not everything on reddit is great, but if you’re on the right subreddits, there’s a good chance that you’ll stumble across a recipe you want to try.
TikTok: There are a ton of one-minute recipe videos on TikTok that are sure to make you hungry. If you search for recipes or view a lot of recipe videos, TikTok’s algorithm will learn that you like that type of content and continue to show you more on your For You Page, so you don’t even have to go out of your way to look for it.
Instagram: Of course, in a blog about finding recipe inspiration, we have to talk about Instagram. It’s a photo-first platform, which is perfect for food photography. Search through food related hashtags or go to the Explore page and start browsing. You can even follow specific hashtags of food you enjoy (e.g. #italianrecipes) so new posts that use that hashtag appear in your feed.
Take Inspiration From Restaurant Menus
Have you ever been to a restaurant and ate something so delicious that you wished you could eat it everyday? Well guess what, if you figure out how to make it, you can eat it all the time without having to pay restaurant prices.
So how does one reverse engineer a recipe? A good starting point is the menu that you ordered off of. Most restaurants will have a list of ingredients in the description of the dish, and if the restaurant is fancy enough, the name of the dish will include clues as to how it was cooked — words like “seared”, “braised”, or “poached” can give a lot of insight into what exactly happened behind the scenes to cook the dish.
Once you have a list of ingredients and potential techniques, it’s time to use your Google-Fu. Start by searching for the dishes name and see what other people have done. If you find a recipe, compare their ingredients with the ingredients you have.
Once you’ve settled on a recipe, try making it yourself and compare. Was your version too spicy, too watery, too acidic, or just missing something? Cook the recipe again in the future and make some adjustments. Keep doing this until you’ve nailed it.
This process is a good way to develop your palate by forcing you to think critically about the flavours and textures of the food that you’re eating. It can also help you save a ton of money!
Subscribe to YouTube Channels
YouTube is a constant source of recipe inspiration for us — we subscribe to a ton of cooking channels so we get a flood of new ideas for dishes to make in our subscription feed. Check out our list of cooking YouTube channels and subscribe to a few that interest you! If you watch a bunch of food videos, YouTube’s algorithm will start suggesting you more and more. It’s pretty much an endless source of recipe inspiration!
Bonus Tips
If you’ve implemented any of these strategies for finding new recipes, you might find yourself feeling overwhelmed. So many recipes, so little time. How do you choose? Here are some tips to help counter that:
Save recipes in Google Keep (tag notes with a recipe label), create a Google Sheet, or organize recipes in Notion. Only save the recipes you really want to try and have the capacity to cook.
Choose one new recipe a week to make — don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to cook several new dishes each week. Take it slow.
If you’re cooking for one, sometimes it can be hard to find the motivation to cook yourself a good meal. Invite a friend over on the weekend for supper and cook a new recipe — give them a few options to choose from if you’re feeling paralyzed with choice.
We know that trying to find recipe inspiration can be difficult. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and eat the same thing over and over again. But food shouldn’t just be sustenance — it should be enjoyed too!
We hope that our list of tips and tricks helps you explore the vast world of food and also helps you kick that UberEats habit.
Where do you find recipe inspiration? Let us know in the comments below!
