Picking Meals:
Select the “Add your meal” box, and input the names of foods you already have on-hand—such as “pizza”, “mac & cheese”, “trout and a side”, whatever you like. Or, if you’d plan to get particular meals, that you don’t yet have, those can be entered as well! It’s up to you!
For the “(Optional) Notes/ingredients” box, you can type in something, like “Make sure the pizza is pepperoni!”, “If out of mac & cheese, we’ll have donuts for dinner instead. Lol.”, “Butter, milk, potato flakes for the side.”, etc. Or, you can leave that spot blank!
As for the tags, the same logic applies. You can put something in there, or choose not to!
Hit the “Add!” button!
—Q: “But wait! What if I forgot to add something?!? —
—A: No problem!! You’ll be able to edit it later! I’ll touch on that, soon!—
Shuffle Those Meals!!
As you may have noticed, the more dinner ideas you add, the more meal names continue to populate the list above the shuffle, clear and export buttons. Regardless of how many you enter (I, myself, have only tested a handful), once you press the shuffle button, they’ll all be randomly attached to a day within the calendar below. You can shuffle them as much as you desire.
— Q: “Wait!! What do those buttons mean?” —
—A: Glad you asked! The “Shuffle That Month!” button does exactly that; it mixes up all the meals you entered that are shown in the live list above. The “Clear The Calendar” button removes all the randomly shuffled meals from it, and only from the calendar; the live list will remain untouched. The “Print Calendar” button opens a new, small, window with just the calendar cells in view, as opposed to the entire site's page--and in printer-friendly black and white! No one's printer needs to be choking on uneccessary colors! Haha. And yes, the "Print That Calendar!" button will disappear during the print preview. Also, within that print preview menu, at the "Destination" box where your printer shows up instead of printing it, you can also select "Save as PDF", if you so desire.—
Dynamic Month Toggle
Use this to switch between showing the current month’s name, or having a more generic calendar with just day numbers. This also effects the name of the current month higher up on the page. This Dynamic Month function is SUPPOSED to go by what your computer calendar month is in real-time, but since I’ve only tested it between July and August so far—and they both contain 31 days—I’ll have to play this by ear haha. That’s also another reason as to why the generic option exists. Also, I’d rather not make my computer’s month different on purpose just to test this; I’m fine with waiting! Haha.
The Calendar
As previously explained, the Dynamic Month toggle is supposed to update with the current month, when activated. And, since you’ve been waiting patiently, the answer to an earlier question will soon be revealed!
This calendar can:
be edited directly; if you forgot to add an ingredient, or would want to update the previous chosen meal to something else, you can do that by clicking on it, making the changes and hitting save. You can also X out of it if you clicked on it by mistake. Also, if you want to remove a day’s meal, just delete it right out of the appropriate box and select save.
allow for individual blocks to be exchanged, without carrying the date along with it. For example, if you had pizza down for August 9th, and wanted to switch it to a stir fry you planned to make on the 29th instead, you’d just have to drag and drop August 9th’s meal into August 29th’s spot on the calendar and viola!!!! It will be swapped!
— Q: “That’s cool, and all, but I just noticed the site remembers everything I updated, even after a refresh! And if I exit the page!” —
—A: Yep. This site auto-saves each entered/selected difference locally within the browser. But, it’s still good to export a read-to-print printer-friendly screenshot of it, just in case via the "Print Calendar" button. Backups are good, and can really be lifesavers! If you ever happened to clear your browser’s cache, all the saved data will be cleared too; so, if you don’t want that to happen, remember to export those images of the calendar for printing! Or take a screenshot, camera photo, etc haha.—