I admit it, I’m a huge homemaking geek. (But you already knew that, right?) One of the things I love to find out is how others manage things that are seemingly mundane, like menu planning. It’s a biweekly ritual for me to sit down with all my recipe bookmarks and cookbooks, coupons and grocery list, and figure out what I want to make for dinners over the next two weeks. (I’m a bit lazy about breakfast and lunch, so I don’t really “plan” those…) Since cooking is one of my hobbies, I always like picking out new recipes to try, as well a reviving old ones from past months that we enjoyed.
I tend to be a bit of a control freak when it comes to menu planning and sorting things out… I have calendars I created just for dinner menus that I can plot things out on! Plus, much like blogging, I have a bit of a schedule as to what sort of dinners to plan for what nights (vegetarian, meat nights, pasta, etc.). In a way it keeps me focused (there are so many recipes to try) and I know what to expect on certain days of the week. Because I shop for multiple weeks at a time as well, I tend to make the dishes that require the most fresh produce towards the beginning and save things that are more reliant on frozen or canned goods for the end.
I just made a new set of calendar pages for 2011 for myself (much fancier than this year’s!), and thought I’d share them! If you’re interested, I’ve uploaded the full-size file here. Just print off as many as you want (I print enough for a full year at once and just keep them in my recipe binder), and then fill in the appropriate month and days as you go along. I keep mine tacked up in the kitchen for easy reference and to note down the flops and successes!
Do you menu plan? What are some of your strategies? What are some of your favorite places to find dinner inspiration and recipes?
I wish I had it in my to do this as well, but I’m not that organised or consequent. Sometimes I don’t even have the energy to cook. Having a schedule would be a great help to me, if I just could hold myself to it.
Do you always depend on recipies or do you also throw together stuff?
Linden blossoms in my tea
I love how superbly organised this is. I have no call for this normally, but it would be very useful over Christmas when we’re entertaining a lot (and I’m stressing already). I’m feeling calmer even as I print the file! Thanks!
Lovely! Thank you for sharing this. I will print it and try to make monthly menu’s. I did do this week by week before but now I have gotten lazy. Maybe this cute palnner will get me started again.
Thank you from Clinen in Sweden.
That’s exactly what I do!! Except not quite as prettily! I love planning the menus. I get quite excited looking for new recipes! I also have a shopping list at the side of mine (I do it on a weekly basis) and try to plan it so that I can use leftovers/excess produce. I’m the same in that I plan for the fresh-produce-heavy recipes at the beginning of the week and for recipes using produce that keeps for later on in the week. And I am the same as you with breakfast and lunch! Recipe-wise, I have so many books that I have barely even touched the surface of yet. I love reading cookery books (and sewing books) just before I go to sleep instead of a novel sometimes (is that a little sad?!!) x
My grandmother used to write out a month’s worth of meals…I was very impressed with that because my mother (of 10) always seemed to be winging it! No wonder she always had a pot of soup on the stove. She was covered even if she didn’t know what she was making for dinner.
Anyhow, my grandmother was very organized. I think she borrowed her ideas from the woman’s magazines, which still publish 30 days’ worth of meals. Some things just don’t change!
We plan our meals too–makes shopping easier and much, much more economical if you stick to your shopping list. LOVE how you organize it and what a great form! People use to keep notes or a journal of their dinner party menus and their guests preferences, dietary restrictions, etc., and I always thought that would be kind of cool in a hostest with the mostest sort of way. I always check cookbooks out from the library to vary our menus, try really classic cookbooks that are no longer in print, and to do a test run. If we really like it and feel we’d like regular meals out of it, I then buy the cookbook or find it secondhand if it’s out of print.
We plan our meals a week ahead and then we go shopping together. Our menus are not as fancy as yours, usually they’re just a piece of paper on the fridge. We also cook according to the plan, since I’m mostly into cooking traditional Swedish food and maybe French food as well, while hubby likes cooking Asian and German food. He does most of the cooking, though, since he’s the best cook.
Wow, you’re so organized! I also keep scraps with recipes, coupons, articles, tags, you name it, but I see them piling up and still haven’t figured out where to keep them and how to organize them. I love the menu organizer, so cute! I’d seen something like this in a store here in Buenos Aires a few months ago. I was going to buy it but I didn’t want to spend money on that. Thank you so much for sharing this!!!
Miki.
I wish I were this organized. I work 12 hour shifts so the days I work I don’t cook. Sometimes I will put a roast or stew in the crock pot before I leave for work, but I leave before 6am. I often cook things on my days off that I know will have leftovers for the days I do work.
I look at the ads in the paper, if roasts, chicken or whatever are on sale, that is what we will have. I love trying new recipes, but they pretty much have to have ingredients I know we will eat. Yesterday I worked at my other part time job and didn’t know when my hubby would be home so made a semi-homemade dinner several frozen and premade things from the store.
I just printed out your planner and think I’m going to try to this. I do plan ahead mentally. Like on the days my granddau is here I plan to make something she loves.
We are having our Thanksgiving here on Wednesday so I have been planning what I will cook for that. Some other family members are bringing things too. I work on Christmas this year so I’ve already had to start planning our meal on Christmas Eve with my daughter and her family.
Thanks for the cute planner. I’m going to try to be a bit more organized.
I plan out weekly meals, too. I find that it really takes some of the stress out of the work week and I’m more likely to eat fairly balanced meals. I get a lot of my recipes from the New York Times website and from Mark Bittman’s cookbook “How to Cook Everything.”
thank you for sharing! funny, I’ve started planning menus this month for the first time. I’ve realized that my meals aren’t balanced enough (not enough proteins and cooked meals), so I had to do something about it.
but i’ve gathered together recipes and shopping lists for this season. I like to organize and play a litlle housekeeper, altough I don’t have a partner or a family of my own.
i’ve already planed them for christmas holidays but not yet for the next week.
Your menu planner is adorable! I’ve wanted to be more consistent in my meal planning. Your planner is going to help
Since moving in with my boyfriend last May I have been enjoying playing ‘homemaker’ and planning our weekly meals and writing our shopping lists. I love cooking and love that I now have two people to cook for so I get to try out loads of new recipies. My bf and I have a good deal going on, I cook, he washes up – both of us are very happy with the arrangement! LOVE the monthly meal planner you have kindly shared with us – I definately think I will be using it. At the moment I write out our meals on a small whiteboard that I reuse each week. Both my bf and I work so I try to think of meals that could maybe be taken into work the next day for lunch. But I’m finding that hard as he seems to eat all the leftovers the same night!!! Getting so sick of sandwiches for lunch these days and its now too cold to take salads in. I guess it’s time to start making loads of soups!
I would love to have a nosey at some of your past meal plans – I love seeing what other people cook in the hopes it might inspire!
oh, meal planning for a month is a fantastic idea! i never decide what i’ll be making until the night before and it ends up being stressful because i have to base it off items i have. so, thank you! i bet it makes grocery shopping a lot easier, too!
My husband does the grocery shopping on his way home from work…LOL I know this sounds silly and backwards but the grocery store on his way home has the most fantastic prices!! + it is quite far away from our home… Their prices are better than Walmart’s! Anyways… I could probably menu plan and prepare a list for him to take – getting started is the hard part… I’ve been so disorganized for so many years now…. LOL!! Thank you for sharing your ideas and I’m going to print out one of your calendars and give it a try.
I wish I could be so organized about it! The best I have done is to sit down with a notepad and list dinners on one sheet while making a grocery list on another. If I have a dish that requires a special ingredient (cilantro, ginger, etc.), I will try to do another meal to use up those ingredients.
Once I have a week’s worth of meals, I am ready to go shopping.
With 2 kids and a ravenous husband, there is no way I can shop for 2 weeks at a time. As it is, I make trips back to the store during the week to pick up more milk, eggs, and bread. I love to cook, but the grocery store is the bane of my existence!
I usually plan out a week ahead – I admire your ability to do more. I usually do a monthly shopping, to stock up on non-perishables, or things I can freeze, and then supplement with fresh stuff as I need it. I’m a big believer in letting the season dictate what I eat, so that’s my main inspiration, and why I like getting at least one cooking magazine a month to get new ideas on using seasonal produce. I really miss Gourmet magazine! Sigh.
Well, hello there.
I too get organized. I have a red leather ( A5 ) Filofax organizer by my kitchen counter. Another- mortal calendar- travels in my purse. In the red leathery friend I write down cleaning targets by day, daily plans and daily menu plans. This helps me a lot. I´m a single mom of a disabled child who needs boatload of therapies and attention. Plus we are constantly testing for new food allergies alongside existing allergies, so everything needs to be planned in order to it go swiftly. I could not do the half of the stuff that I do, were it not for my endless lists and plans. I plan our meals the week ahead, shop for groceries once a week and for fresh produce twice a week. Yet for the “extras” and diet lists ( for mapping out food allergies ) I already have mapped out till the end of March 2011. And there´ll be at two trips to Central Hospital ( for clinical tests and one for surgery ) during this time, plus additional week in hospital to further test the position on which he is on autism spectrum. So you see why it is good to pen down your life. I already have next year filled up pretty spiffy, at least the first two quarters.
that’s really cute. I usually go week by week. But then my husband does something like he did this week saying, “I really want pancakes for dinner.” and I therefore moved over my meal for the night over for the following one just to please his sudden craving. haha.
You probably cook really great things!!!
I am a new convert to app-based meal planning! It took some investment of time to get all my favorite recipies entered initially, but now that I have them, I can plan for the week very easily (and it even generates my shopping list!). When I get a new cookbook, or find a new recipe I want to try, it’s quick to add it to my database, and then to my meal-planning rotation
I use the MealBoard app for the iPod touch.
Not really, I confess. Not as much as I’d like to, certainly. I have shelves of cookbooks that get used, but not nearly as much as I would like to use them. I sometimes get a wild hare and really do plan a special meal, but mostly I wing it with what we have in the pantry. That’s not a bad thing, really, because we generally have decent staples around. I don’t have the same tastes as the rest of the household, though, so I can’t get too adventurous or I risk stuff going to waste.
I actually have plans for company this Sunday: Chicken noodle soup, cornbread, and pumpkin pie. And homemade applesauce, if they want.
We’re not elaborate cooks in my family but we have a repertoire of meals that can be thrown together pretty quickly, and we’ve never felt the need to do all the trimmings. Dinners were always basic protein, carb, vegetable. No duplicates. If we had spaghetti, we didn’t do garlic bread, too.
We always cook ahead. If we bake chicken, bake extra. If we make rice, make extra. If we chop onion, chop extra. Make soup, make extra and freeze it. Leftover baked chicken over salad is dinner in five minutes. Rice scrambled into an egg is a fast breakfast. If there’s a sale on eggs, we buy a bunch and hard-boil them; hard-boiled eggs are portable, not messy, can be eaten cold, and are a great self-contained protein source when you can’t think of anything else to go with your vegetables and carbohydrate, or don’t want to mess with raw meat (if you eat meat). If I make oatmeal, I do the 6-serving batch, then I pour it into a pan (flat Tupperware, actually), let it cool, and divide it into 6 sections with a knife. When I need breakfast in a hurry, I pop out a section, microwave it, fluff it up, and eat it alongside one of those pre-boiled eggs. It’s healthy, cheap (one cardboard tub of name-brand oatmeal is $2.75 at my grocery. Generic is even cheaper), low-calorie, keeps me full for hours, and I only have to wash the oatmeal pot once a week.
I use Meals Matter http://www.mealsmatter.org/ To plan the meals.
To get new recipe ideas I use All Recipes http://allrecipes.com/ random web sites and a blog called the 50s Times http://my50syear.blogspot.com/ and her web site the Apron Revolution http://www.theapronrevolution.com/index.html (her bread recipe is SOOOO GOOOD!!!!
Anywho thats were I get meal plans from.
I’m a new reader (added you to my reader today!) and you’re already speakin’ my language! I plan our meals weekly. I sit down and search for recipes on websites like Taste Spotting and Real Simple, based on the ingredients I have readily available. Then, I post them on the fridge so my husband and I always know what’s for dinner. Looking forward to some of the meals I’ve planned has really cut down on those “I don’t really feel like cooking, let’s get take out,” nights! (And my cooking has improved vastly, bonus!)
My two flatmates and I usually cook and eat dinner together. We plan and shop alternately twice a week. So it is never too much to carry for one person and we can incorporate changing evening plans. And so there is always bananas – they just seem to vanish in our household, perhaps there is a orang-utan hiding somewhere.
Wanted to let you know my Vintage Vogue Sewing book came this week that you recommended on another post. I love it thanks. So many things in there I had forgotten about and this is a great reference for me when sewing.
I am also very organized and loove planning but when it comes to dinner planning i am not so good at it! i’ve only tried a couple of times, buti really would like to get into the habit. i always stray from the path of my plan lol. or sometimes we plan something but the produce here is not very good and we change our mind of what we want to eat and when. i need to try again and try not to stray from the plan. i wish all of america had awesome produce like california does!
but i think we are pcs’ing ot Alaska…and i have a feeling that they wont have good produce either!
Cute menus! I love to plan ahead for big holiday meals and I make timelines for what needs to be done when. For regular cooking, I like to shop for whatever produce is good and what’s on sale (and in the summers I get a weekly box of veggies from my CSA). Then I throw things together based on what I have. However, that means frequent quick trips to the local co-op for the one ingredient I’m missing. Also, some weeks I’m inspired and every day is something delicious, but then I hit a week of non-inspiration and feel like take-out each night, so I could probably use a bit more planning ahead.
Casey this is GREAT!! My boss has been looking for a nice way to plan out meals for the kids ( I’m a nanny) and this is just it! I’m printing some as we speak! As for me i always like to plan out what I’m making for the week. I have several vintage cookbooks i use regularly … The New American Cook Book ( 1942 ) Culinary Arts Institute Cookbook ( 1959 and 1976 editions) and Julia Childs “The Art of Mastering French Cooking” newest edition. And if I’m not using a cookbook it’s usually from a cooking magazine. My favorites include Cooking light, Food Network mag. Real Simple and Bon Appetite
Your menu is sweet! I have 3 kids, so menu planning would help me a lot, but I rarely do it. I just don’t have that much uninterrupted time. We get a box from some farmers every couple of weeks, and I find that planning a basic menu around those ingredients helps me enough right now… and offers me some flexibility with my husband’s crazy schedule.
One of my favorite places to go for recipes is http://www.southernplate.com. The author is from right here in Alabama, and posts recipes of foods that I grew up on here in the South
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Oh perfect timing thanks! I was just thinking earlier in the week that I need some sort of calendar for my meal plans (I do plan, but just write it down on a scrap of paper…that needs to change), so this is brilliant. Thanks heaps, somehow you read my mind and your posts are always perfection!
Such a great idea. I definitely need to start planning!
How pretty! This sure beats my usual calendar page from whatever calender we get in the mail at the end of the year (usually the realtor). I will definitely use these. Plus it will be a nice reminder of you.
Dad spotted that familiar cookbook when I showed him that nice picture at the head of your post. That cup is very cute, too!
I wish I could plan two weeks at a time. Wow! Remember when I did a month at a time, and we actually did most of the shopping for it, too?
Mom
I plan about 7 dinners at a time, but this will usually keep us fed for about 2 weeks what with leftovers and the occasional dinner out. I love AllRecipes.com and I use that as my base. All the recipes I would make again get entered as a Personal Recipe. I don’t type out the whole recipe, just the ingredients and notes to what book it’s from and then store it under one of my folders in my profile. That way whenever I want to make something and I’m searching for a certain type of recipe, I can use a search bar instead of flipping through books trying to find a recipe for green beans.
Plus, if I need a recipe and Smitten Kitchen (my absolute favorite food blog) doesn’t have a recipe for it, I can always find something on AllRecipes.com that has a good rating with lots of reviews and suggestions for changes.
Now something this pretty might actually make meal planning something to love!
We plan a week at a time and, between my sister’s leaning towards vegetarian, my mama’s attempts for a gluten-free/low-carb (aka high protein) diet and my nephew’s 10-year-old refusal to eat anything but hotdogs, it can be stressful! So far, spaghetti night is the only thing we can all agree on! We have a homemade cookbook of all our favorites and fall-backs, but for something new, we always hit tastespotting.com or food network. Yum! I’d love to plan a bit farther ahead and only go grocery shopping once every two weeks…that would be nice.
For years we have off and on cooked up a month of meals in a Saturday. I have a once of month cooking cookbook. The food is pretty good but we don’t eat it every night, just a couple of nights a week.. I also LOVE the book Bake and Freeze Desserts by Elinor Klivans. The best chocolate chip cookies I have ever ate are on pg. 81. I love to freeze the desserts because I can portion control them and the cookies from the freezer are soooo good. We live on a farm, so going to the store is like going to town, it doesn’t happen often. And we have folks stop by often and are able to give them a baked good that taste like I just made it! Oh, I also plan a month at a time and have a great check off grocery list in my word docs.
I love Menu planning! I have made schedules too. but I never thought of doing 2 weeks at a time since I was worried about the fresh veggies. You’ve solved that problem as well.
I definitly have to do this!
!
I extemporize most of the time my dinners (actually our dinners!), but I like this idea of planning. It’s also a way to share with my boyfriend what I’m going to do
B.
Nope, no planning here…. I live alone and cooking a complete meal just for me seems to be too much work…I do occasionally throw stuff in the crock pot.. And I get to cook on Thursday which I’m pretty excited about.
If I didn’t plan my meals ahead of shopping my basket would be full of junk. Sometimes I make the mistake of shopping hungry which is my downfall. I like the idea of actually coming up with full menus, all of mine are on pieces of paper that I’ll find a year later. It’s always nice to see recipes that my Mum used to make when she was single or just newly married, it’s like cooking history if that makes any sense. I love the idea of making pretty menus, if not just for the future generation to see what I used to cook, if they care that is.
Well, I am not the happy homemaker that you are since cooking is the LAST thing that I like to do but I do something similar to you. However, I like to be organized and plan things. I have 4 weeks worth of recipes for each season. I put in recipes that utilize fresh ingredients. Each week is on the computer with a shopping list already made so all I have to do is print it out and give it to hubby who does all the shopping. I usually have one night a week where I try a new recipe. If it passes the family taste test, then I put it into the rotation. It means repeating the menus every four weeks but I am fine with that!
Thank you so much for sharing. This is just the right kick up my backside I needed!
I used to plan my dinners, I absolutely loved doing it. But after I had my child (who is 2 by now) I never found my way back into an organised kitchen, I don’t even cook that much anymore let alone adventurous. My partner does an awful lot of cooking and I keep joking that I need to fight for my old place.
I shall print this out and start planning and therefore cook poperly again!
This is lovely Casey ~ thanks so much for sharing! I must admit that I am hopeless at cooking; my homemaking skills more fall under the field of house work. I schedule a Monday to Friday chore routine which works something like the “Wash on Monday” rhyme.
I am better at that becasue I love being organized, but hate having to clean up after cooking and, admittedly, my cooking isn’t very inspired at all. I am hoping that if I try a dinner planner, I might get better!
xox,
bonita of Depict This!