I haven’t written up an FAQ for Savour Fare, but if I did, it might consist of only one question: “How do you find the time to do it all?” I have a full time job outside the home, a charming but demanding toddler, a somewhat less demanding husband, and a blog. What I don’t have is a full night’s sleep, a regular workout schedule or time to myself. All of which I would like to have more of. So when I find ways to streamline my routine — to eke out an extra few minutes to sleep, to take a walk or just to stare off into space — I seize them eagerly. And because I know many of you are in the same boat, with lives that are overflowing with things both wonderful and mundane — I come and share them with you.

One of these things is the shopping. I shop once a week. Sometimes, depending on my time, my needs and my budget, I will do this weekly shopping at multiple stores and the farmer’s market. Other times, I can confine it to one store. But I keep it to once a week. This means I have to sit down, usually on Friday night or Saturday morning, and come up with a meal plan for the week, which takes some time, but this also means I don’t spend precious hours on a weeknight or my nonexistent lunch hour stopping by the store to just pick a few things up for dinner that night.

When I plan meals, I usually sit down with a stack of cookbooks and blogs (a virtual stack in that case), looking for inspiration, and I jot down an informal meal plan for dinners, using my inspiration and a menta list of weeknight standards. Then I factor in which ones make leftovers that are good for lunches. Then I start in on the list, trying to remember all the ingredients which make up all of the meals, the breakfasts, lunches and dinners.

This process can be a bit laborious, which is why I was very happy to discover Ziplist.com. In the interests of full disclosure, I only discovered Ziplist because they were sponsoring a blogger to go to Camp Blogaway. However, I quickly realized that this was a service I found valuable that my readers might find valuable as well, so I applied for the sponsorship and was chosen. Ziplist sponsored my weekend at Camp, and in connection with that, this is a sponsored post. However, I only accept sponsorship from, and write reviews of, products that I think are useful and relevant, and Ziplist is both.

Ziplist is an online utility (they also have an iphone app, but I am, sadly, as yet uniphoneless) that allows you to create an online grocery list and to share it. Having my grocery list available all the time means that I add things whenever I think of them (like when I sign up at the Nuni’s preschool to bring dried fruit for their cooking project the following week) instead of waiting until Friday night or Saturday morning (and inevitably forgetting things in the process). I can save my list from the previous week and start to recognize things that are staples on my regular list (bananas, coffee, milk, whole wheat bread, eggs, butter). And if I do forget something, I can send it to my husband and say “Can you pick up a few things on your way home from work?”

Ziplist also has a very neat feature where it has partnered with several recipe sites that automatically allow you to add the ingredients from a recipe into your grocery list. If I find a recipe that inspires me or I get an idea for dinner early in the week, I can just populate my grocery list with the ingredients right away, and I won’t miss anything. Savour Fare has recently become a Ziplist partner (you may have noticed the “Add to Ziplist” button in my post on the Grits and Greens Casserole) and I hope to add more recipes into their database soon. In the meantime, if you want to add any of my recipes (or recipes from other websites, though I really have no IDEA WHY you would even try anything else!) they have a “recipe” clipper feature that allows you to cut and paste directly into your grocery list.

Ziplist has allowed me to streamline my meal planning and grocery shopping process, which leaves me more time for all sorts of very important things — more cooking, more blogging, more work and even someday, more sleep (a girl can dream, can’t she?)