Menu Planning Basics

More Friday re-runs! This post was originally published on January 9, 2009.

A couple years ago, I began pre-planning our weekly dinners and I've never looked back. It has saved me time and money, I've dramatically reduced our food waste and best of all...no more 5pm STRESS!

I fought the idea of meal planning for a long time, partially because it overwhelmed me but also because it took the spontaneity out of dinner. But here's the thing: before meal planning, the stressful moments FAR outweighed the spontaneous ones.

I'm sure many of you out there hesitate to try planning your menus. But hang with me as I break down the process to the basics so you can see how simple it really is.

* Start by making a list of meals that you enjoy and eat regularly. I categorize mine by type: chicken, fish, beef and meatless and also by cooking method: crock pot, stove top, grill and oven.

* Figure out what you already have that can be used to make a full meal. Start with fresh ingredients and produce then move to the freezer for meats and the pantry for dry items you have on hand. Jot down which meals from your list you can cook without going to the store for every ingredient.

* Other places I find meal ideas are my recipe binder (to see if there are new recipes I'm willing to try that week or that I have all of the ingredients for), Cooking Light for healthy meals and Super Cook, where you can type in ingedients and it will pull up recipes to use what you have. I like to try at least one new recipe each week so I don't get in a rut, but that's just me...I like to cook and experiment.

* Once you have about 5-10 meals written down, pull out your calendar (I used a small, checkbook-sized calendar that fit in my purse last year and it worked really well) and slot the meals into the days you'll cook them. (Tip: write in pencil! Plans change, schedules change, you'll end up with extra leftovers, you'll need some flexibility.) I like to plan easy meals on busy days, crock-pot meals on days when I have appointments in the afternoon and new recipes for slower days. I also reserve oven meals for the weekends because it heats up the whole house and we don't need the extra A/C costs when it's warm outside. In December and January we'll cook more in the oven, but I do my best to avoid it the rest of the year.

* Make your grocery list. Look through the recipes one more time and check to see what you need from the store. Remember to see how much you need of an item or if it may be needed for more than one recipe and if you have enough of it.

* One thing I have NOT been paying attention to is balancing fattening heavier meals with lighter meals within the same week. I think that's part of the reason my waist line has been expanding. Good food can still be high in calories, especially those with lots of cheese, butter or thick sauces. But who really wants soup every night for a week? Or chicken and rice four times? I need to look at the bigger picture and make sure I'm mixing it up.

* The other thing I'm going to start doing is varying the contents of the meals. We seem to eat a lot of chicken, but then I'll go on a beef kick and eat too much beef in a week (I'd prefer to keep it to once a week, max) and I really want to incorporate my 65th goal of making three vegetarian meals each week for a month. So far, I'm having trouble just doing TWO.

* I'm also going to start attempting to cook cheaper menus without completely sacrificing the quality of the meals. I recently found the $5 Dinners blog and will try to incorporate one or two of those each week, too. I've come to finally realize (I'm slow) that part of cooking cheap is shopping cheap and having food that you can use on-hand instead of buying it at a premium at the store. If you don't have much food stocked up, consider shopping from the sale ads and planning the following week's meals around those items. Read my recent post about how to save money at the store to learn how to reduce your grocery spending.

So who's with me? Are you willing to give meal planning a try? Unless you eat out every night, you ARE planning your meals, it's just a matter of doing it once a week instead of seven times a week. You can still be spontaneous at breakfast and lunch if you just start with dinners.