Easy Menu Planning

 

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I was recently inspired by Stephanie at Keeper Of The Home to revisit my menu planning strategy.  Earlier in the year Stephanie began a series called Organization in the Real Food Kitchen with a post about menu planning.  Of course my ears (eyes?) pricked up because if there's one thing I'm most hopeless with, it's keeping up with the the whole food preparation merry-go-round.  I love collecting new recipes to try, and absolutely adore browsing food magazines, but I seem to have a teeeeeensy issue with follow-through!

I've done every known form of menu planning and food organization at one point or another - once a month cooking, ultra-scratch cooking, stockpiling, staring blankly at the contents of the pantry at 5:00 for weeks at a time, visiting the grocery store daily (yes, daily! When the cashiers know your first name - and you don't live in a small country town - you know you're in trouble!), planning every morsel of every meal to cross our lips down to the last half cup of rice, scouring the magazines and making elaborate lists of meals, printing off countless blank calendars to schedule a month of meals at a time, following a 'If it's Monday, it's Spaghetti' meal categorization plan, emailed menus written by others and even throwing my hands up in the air in desperation.

Here's a novel thought - the problem with trying all the different menu planning options out there is that the guru lauding the praises of this or that plan isn't you.  And the people she (and occasionally, he) is trying to feed aren't your family.

So I've given up trying to be a gourmet cook.  Or even super-organized.  I no longer schedule chicken dishes for Tuesdays and freezer meals or leftovers for Fridays.  I've even stopped slotting in meals on the calendar.  What am I concentrating on instead? Good ol' fashioned home cooking (appropriately re-fashioned to a lower-fat version if necessary) with plenty of vegetables.  That's pretty much it.

Stephanie - and a whole slew of others, except me (my bad!) - uses forms and printables by ListPlanIt to help with menu planning.  Jen at ListPlanIt is a pretty cluey kind of gal.  She knows that most home managers (myself included) tend to cook using a small but well-liked range of dinner recipes, so she created a printable to fit.  Her figure is 21 meals, and that sounds about right to me, so I set about compiling my own list.  Here's what I discovered:

• When I got to about the 15 meal mark, I realised that every member of our family is perfectly happy (thrilled even!) to see certain meals repeated a couple of times a month.  So duplicates of those got added to the list. Once eaten, the meal is crossed off.
• Many of the meals I cook regularly can be switched up with little or no extra effort - serving rice instead of noodles or traditional pizza with delicious homemade dough vs thin-n-crispy pizza using pita bread.  Even 'eggs' could be scrambled, fried or made into an omelette.  I added variations on the side of each meal entry.
• I still like to put the plan aside occasionally so along with my 21 meals I left room to jot down an additional 7, as I discover them online or in magazines.  This allows me to try new meals (with the eventual aim to expand our meal list), alleviates meal boredom (even though we all like the 21 meals, the prospect of a delicious new meal is exciting) and gives me scope for creativity as my mood and energy dictates.
• It also means that once my 21 meals were chosen, I only needed to plan 7 meals to round out an entire month's menu.  The remaining 2 meals were written down as 'takeout' and 'freezer meal/leftovers' with the bonus last meal (no. 31, depending on the month) as an additional freezer/leftovers meal.  Only extending my brain to find 7 new meals a month? Win!

There's a wonderful benefit to this kind of menu planning.  Grocery shopping for the month is an absolute breeze.  If you're extra clever, you'll compile a master grocery list with all the ingredients and amounts needed to make your 21 meals.  Then, when you're adding your additional 7 meals, you'll throw those ingredients into the mix too, and you're done.  Totally easy, and apart from perhaps an hour's worth of initial set-up, super-quick.  And buying in bulk is easier too, since you'll know exactly how many chicken breasts / heads of lettuce / steaks you'll need each month.

All the benefits of traditional menu planning and grocery management but super-flexible.  Love it!