Cooking Baby Steps - Part III

Since its Thanksgiving week and since I will be doing some cooking for Thanksgiving dinner I was checking out the Publix web site to figure out their hours this week.

In looking at the Publix web site, I discovered that they have some helpful recipe tools and, more importantly, a grocery list tool.  The grocery list tool can be personalized to your specific store and as you add items to the list it populates the location within the store so you don't have to wander around aimlessly.  And, you can also add items from the weekly sale list and/or populate your grocery list from their recipe tools.  You can also set up a standard grocery list of items that you buy regularly.

Since I am trying to do better on my cooking at home goal, I decided to sign up for a Publix profile.  I am not a fan of having corporations track me and mine my data, but in order to save my grocery list I needed a profile.  So I used my junk e-mail address (the one I use for shopping on-line) and when it asked for all my data I used my standard fake information which only includes my real zip code.

Once I had my Publix profile set up, I started adding items from my Thanksgiving recipe (I'm making one casserole dish for our group dinner) as well as regular items that I'll need to pick up since I'll have guests in town.  The grocery list doesn't have each and every brand which is a bummer as it would be great if I could specify in my list the particular brands that I use (it does have a notes section where you can add that information).

Since we will have guests to cook for on Friday, I also tried out Publix's Simple Meals Recipe tool which is divided among different categories like "main dish" and "celebrations", etc.  I clicked on main dish which has different categories like "beef", "vegetarian", "seafood (salmon)" and "seafood (shellfish)".  I was already planning on salmon, so I clicked on a recipe that sounded easy and good and then it is one easy step to populate your grocery list with all the necessary items (you can delete those items that are already in your pantry).  You can also save the recipes to your profile as well.

I plan to go shopping Tuesday evening, so I'll continue to work on my list between now and then and I'll report back on whether this tool is helpful or not.  What do you do to make grocery shopping less painful?