I’ve been familiar with Sprindpad for about a year, but it’s taken yours truly, The Clean Eating Coach, awhile to try out some of the cool tools they have. For example, you can save recipes from any website into your Springpad account and then create a shopping list that you can either print and take with you or view on your PDA while you’re at the store (how’s that for being green and saving on paper?)

So I decided to give the online shopping list a try. As you know, I’m a big fan of shopping early for Thanksgiving dinner to beat the crowds. And today, I put that plan into action, knocking out my shopping without all the crowds, going both to the health food store as well as the big box grocery store.

In addition to the turkey, we’re making several dishes that don’t require a huge amount of effort. Several of them are things you can do in advance and part of my plan is to work on creating things tomorrow,  Tuesday and Wednesday.  I got my inspiration this year from the November/December Clean Eating magazine that had a scrumptious looking menu.  To keep it simple, other than the stuffing which my mom is making, I’m creating the entire menu — sweet potatoes, green beans, turkey and spiced pumpkin mousse. As you can imagine, all the recipes have a clean eating spin so they’re low in fat, use the highest quality ingredients and only use natural sweeteners like pure maple syrup.

Building the shopping list was easy.  Although the Thanksgiving recipes from Clean Eating aren’t available online to put into Springpad, I simply built my list from the recipes in the magazine and added them to my online shopping list. Easy! And you know what else, I don’t have to worry about not being able to read my writing, which sometimes happens.

Since I often like to write notes on my list, I printed it out and brought it with me instead of looking it up on my Blackberry (when I tried to access the site, it didn’t work anyway).  But simply having it with me to use was fabulous. And because it was comprehensive and included a fair amount of forethought, I didn’t have lots of items I added on at the last minute.  I generally buy exactly what I’ve put on the list and only that, and this was no different.

All in all, I have to say it was a helpful tool in making my Thanksgiving shopping a smooth process. That combined with shopping early, makes this Thanksgiving seem so much less stressful than in past years.

What do you do to minimize your time in the grocery store in preparation for Thanksgiving dinner. What tools help make shopping easier?

Filed under: Food Shopping, Food preparation, Meal Planning, Thanksgiving, clean eating