Menu Planning, Windstorms, and Extreme Babying

I had many ambitions for today. I needed to tidy, dust, and vacuum the living room, clean the kitchen, straighten up the clothes that always pile on the hope chest in the bedroom, and keep the woodstove going. To make it challenging, here is what Miss Boo has been doing all day:
And here is her contribution to the "pick up toys" effort:

Also on the list is "make a potpie of all the meat and potatoes-type leftovers I have" because something MUST be done about the leftovers. Here is my fridge, unretouched (am I not brave?):

Sorry, can't figure out how to rotate it. This is one of the major ways I do my menu planning, by the by; I look at my fridge of death (and my related pantry of death) and see what absolutely, positively MUST get used. We'll talk seriously about menu planning here in a bit, but first, look at my dramatic picture!

That is one of the poplar trees in my back yard, blown in half. Not down, you understand, just in half. We had a terrific windstorm here yesterday that sent me running around the house filling our oil lamps, making sure the flashlights had batteries, and that we had wood in the house for the stove. You'd think some lines would have gone down and we'd have lost power-- it was always happening when I lived here before-- but we never did. We just lost the tree instead. It's not so bad, really; the tree was eaten alive with boring beetles anyway that we couldn't eradicate this spring. But I can thing of funner ways to get firewood.

OK, menu planning. Here is the standard way, which is not the way I do it:

1. Look at sale flyers for your friendly neighborhood grocer. Notice pork chops, broccoli, and potatoes are on sale.

2. Build a week's worth of meals around sale items, sketching out each day's breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

3. Write your shopping list based on what you need to make these meals, and the sale items.

4. Go to the store and purchase what is on your list.

5. Come home and follow the menu. You get negative twenty points for having to go back to the store because you forgot to get green chiles.

This style of menu planning is cumbersome to me for several reasons. One is that, being smart, grocery stores never have enough things on sale in a given week to make breakfast, lunch and dinner for the whole week.

So the best way to use this system ends up being to buy more expensive items, like meat and fresh produce, which are on sale and to fill in everything else with things that are generally low-cost. I don't like to do this, because then you HAVE to buy whatever is on sale that week, instead of doing the cheap and sneaky thing of waiting until the chicken legs you want are at their absolute cheapest price. The other reason I don't like this style of menu planning is that I like to have more than a week's worth of food in the house. What if we have a blizzard and I just don't want to haul myself and the bambinos in to town to go grocery shopping?

So here is My Way of menu planning, which is of course a conglomeration of ways that I've stolen from other people. It takes a little more time at startup, but pays you back when you don't have to go to the store as much or spend as much on groceries (I'm right around $60 per week, but I can get it lower if I try):

1. Make a list of what you like to eat. This is a list of breakfast and dinner foods. Lunches at our house are either leftovers, soup and sandwich, or salad and sandwich. Make sure this is a list of what you REALLY eat and not what you think you ought to like to eat (i.e., if you like ham sandwiches, don't feel you need to put lentil burgers on the list just because they seem more virtuous).

2. Figure out what you need to make most of the dishes. You will be surprised how few ingredients this will be. Remember, I'm talking about real ingredients. "Kentucky Fried Chicken", while a dinner option, is not one you'll be cooking.

3. Decide which foods on the list you can afford as "regulars". This is an optional step; if you have a fat grocery budget, go ahead and buy all the kalamata olives for that Greek chicken dish you want. If, however, you are like me and trying to stick to a certain amount per week, you may find that you have to say you're only going to make that dish with the expensive olives on your birthday-- other days you might need to use the regular cheapie black olives.

4. Your list of "regulars" should be a list of dishes that is about 20-25 items long for dinner, and 3-5 items long for breakfast and lunch. Think about it-- how many different things do you really eat for breakfast? Aren't most of us rather stuck in the familiar mud? Besides, Dr. Oz says that if you have fewer options, you also eat less. ;)

5. Decide which seven of the dinner regulars and which 2-3 of the breakfast and lunch regulars you want for the next week. Write them down if you like. I don't put them in a specific sequence, and I also leave room for "leftovers" as an option.

6. With your selections in hand, and knowledge of which ingredients it takes to make them, survey your pantry, fridge, freezer, and spice cabinent and write down which ingredients you will need from the store this week. You will be surprised at how few, if you've done your planning well.

7. Go shopping. If something you need is heinously expensive this week, check to see how many meals that ingredient is for. If it's for just one, scrap that meal and pick a different "regular".

8. Go home. You have everything you need to cook for the next week, two weeks, or however long you shopped for. As you build up your pantry, you will eventually have on hand most of the ingredients for your "regulars" at all times, only having to get fresh things like dairy and some meats (freezers rock). Eventually you might get to the point where you only have to menu plan the night before, since you know you have the ingredients for all your "regulars".

This sounds a good deal more cumbersome than the system I rejected, I know, but if you put a weekend into the listmaking activities, you'll find yourself with much less overall planning and shopping to do. This doesn't preclude special shopping and meals for birthdays, holidays, etc., but for day-to-day meal planning it makes my life much easier.

One other tip: keep your shopping list on the fridge or someplace central. When you run out of mustard, write "mustard" on the list even before you throw away the old bottle. In this way, especially if you maintain a pantry, you'll have your list mostly made for you before shopping day. You can also add items as you think of them while doing something else (like, "my blog post is getting long... mmm, chili cheese grits sound good but I've got no grits").

Tomorrow I'll try to post some links about pantry theory, if anyone is curious. There are folks out there who should have a degree in this stuff who only go shopping every six months. I personally don't want to drink that much powdered milk, but I steal what good ideas I find applicable from them.

Whew! That's long. All done for today.

Happy Menuing,

Breanna