March menu planning

I find that my life functions much more smoothly and happily when I do weekly menu planning.  Yet, because it takes a couple hours to plan and shop, sometimes I find myself in a non-planning rut.  Like February.  RUT.

I tend to be a person who requires a recipe in order to create a meal.  In the past, when I didn’t have a plan and was therefore required to *poof* create a dinner out of whatever we happened to have on hand, I would get really stressed out and more often than not we’d end up eating cereal.  These days, I don’t tend to experience that same stress.  Perhaps its experience and wisdom setting in:)

Another funny thing about my meal planning is that I have a weird thing about not liking to repeat meals.  I spent about a year making a different meal every night.  Well, almost.  We have spaghetti with tofu a lot.  And a few yummy family casseroles make regular appearances.

Thanks to my dear Jessica, I’ve been getting the Everyday Foods magazine every month for a couple years, and I love it.  I just went through all my past issues and pulled my favorite 50-80 recipes.  They’re so good and generally zippy fast.  I’ve made so many recipes from this magazine, and I’ve found that if I like the ingredients (not for example, capers or fennel), it’ll be a yummy dish.

In 2008, in an effort to take charge of my meal planning, I purchased a Plan-It Organizer, which is pretty much a souped-up notebook for organizing weekly meal ideas.  Like a gym membership, paying money motivates me to take action.  If I paid $18 for a notebook, I better get some use out of it!  So I used it faithfully until last fall.  At that point…the same point that I got my iPhone…I decided to try electronic menu planning.  I use Google Calendar for tracking all our activities, so I made a new calendar for our meal plans.  It’s nice because you can easily move around dishes to different days as schedules change.  And now I can check it when I’m away from home.

Since most of my recipes are from Everyday Foods or from cooking blogs, I can link from my calendar to the appropriate recipe…and I often use my iPhone or laptop as a cookbook on the counter while I cook.

I got off the meal-planning band wagon in January and February, but I’m back on now.  Here’s my normal (ideal) procedure:

• Saturday: (this takes 30-40 minutes)
  • consult my calendar to see what activities we have going on the next week so I know how many meals we’ll need
  • flip through magazines or blogs to find recipes and make a list of the recipes I want to eat in the next week
  • make a list of the recipes we want.  Even on weeks we have no evening plans, I usually assign 5-6 meals because one night we have left overs and another night we often end up making other arrangements or life gets crazy and I just boil a package of fresh ravioli with Parmesan for our meal.
  • make a shopping list of the ingredients needed for the meals (this is my least favorite part!)
• Sunday:
  • add to my list all the pantry staples and non-meal-specific items that we need
  • go grocery shopping at Woodman’s

Often I wait to do meal planning until just before I’m going to leave for the grocery store.  I really prefer to do it as a separate activity, though.

In the past, I used a Word document that I had laid out to match Woodman’s as my shopping list. However, since December, I’ve been using an application on my iPhone for grocery shopping.  I’ve got to say that I feel like a complete dork walking around the grocery store, consulting my iPhone instead of a piece of paper like a normal person.  It feels like I’m bragging or being very high-falutin about my technology.  But I do it because I’m avoiding using paper and because it remembers my list from week to week and because I can (and do) add to my grocery list whenever/wherever I happen to remember that I need an item.  I’ve been using the Shopper application, and I like how it allows me to organize the list according to the layout of the store.

Last week, I just found out about a new new service that is going to really streamline my grocery shopping.  Everyday Foods has a new app where you can pick your recipes and it adds all the ingredients to a shopping list.  The shopping list is handled by a website called ZipList, and it’s soooo cool (to me!).  It’s set up to pull recipes from blogs.  So if you’re reading a blog and like the recipe, you click on your little ZipList button in the toolbar, and it copies the recipe to ZipList.  Click another button, and it adds the ingredients to my shopping list.  Ahh, it’s a geek’s life.

The next couple months, I’m looking forward to going against my normal grain and repeating tried and true favorite recipes.  I’ll be posting them on my Google Calendar, so if you’d like any menu inspiration, please take a peek!

Also, if you have favorite dishes or food blogs/sources, let me know!  I always like to try something new:)

PS.  March must be a time I re-commit to meal planning.  Check out this post I did in 2009!