Meal planning

[resonant]

I should have planned ahead how I was going to handle questions when I offered to let people ask me things, but both travels_in_time and riverlight asked about meal planning, so I thought it was worth doing a post rather than a comment.



I used to love to read the Month of Menus in Woman's Day magazine* -- it's just the sort of thing that appeals to an organizer like me.

When the kidlet graduated from baby food, it became a priority for me that we should have homemade meals more often, and frankly I don't care for the spouse's cooking (he doesn't even care if his onions are cut the same size so they cook evenly!), and anyway I was only working part-time, so I took it upon myself to be the primary cook. As it happened, I had a big box of women's magazines that I had bought for $5 at a garage sale, and I tore out a whole bunch of monthly menu pages thinking I had it made.

But it turned out that Woman's Day wasn't really cooking the way I wanted to eat. Nearly every menu was meat-based, the vegetable choices were repetitive and kind of gross (canned asparagus?!), and overall the dishes seemed old-fashioned and not very appetizing.

So I sat down with a blank calendar page, and I assigned a category to each day of the week: meat or poultry on Sundays and fish on Thursdays because those were my grocery-shopping days; soup on Mondays, main-dish salads on Tuesdays, casseroles on Wednesdays, breakfast on Fridays, stir-fry on Saturdays, etc.

And then I took the paper planner that I used to use in those days, put a category at the top of each page, and wrote down the name of every dish in that category that I knew how to make. So let's say the page labeled Soup has a list that looks like this:

Sausage minestrone
Chicken and rice
Potato
Cauliflower and cheese
Spinach and lemon
Mexican lime
Carrot and ginger

Then I would fill out the calendar a month or two at a time, just dropping a soup recipe on every Sunday, in order, until I came to the end of the list, and then starting over.

Obviously the first thing I discovered was that I really didn't know how to make very many things. When I wrote down the things I was making on a regular basis, there were only about 24 of them; we might be repeating the same main-dish salad every three weeks. So the next thing was to gather up all the recipes I'd been thinking of making, and write them down on the appropriate planner page, and begin to slot them into the menu plans. The result of this was to vastly expand my cooking repertoire.

After a while I figured out that it was a good idea to go back to the planner and put down any ingredients that a recipe called for that weren't staples (i.e. that I wasn't already keeping a stock of and replacing when I ran out), so that I could assemble a grocery list while I was putting together the calendar. So now my calendar would say

Sausage Minestrone (1# Italian sausage, zucchini, can kidney beans)
Cobb Salad (chicken tenders)
Spinach Lasagna (mozzarella, jar tomato sauce, bag spinach, ricotta)
Honey-Lime Salmon (limes, green onions buy enough for Sat)
Pancakes, Citrus Sauce (oranges)
Pork Stir-Fry (pork, bok choy if avail or cabbage)
Lamb Chops (lemons)

I only put down main dishes; grains and vegetable/fruit sides were pretty easy to figure out on the fly, depending on what looked good in the produce department and what seemed to "go."

By the time I had followed this process for a year or so, I'd developed some habits about what went with what, so that cobb salad would always come with some sort of muffin and lamb chops would always be accompanied by couscous.

Women's Day also had this thing they called "planned-overs" which I made extensive use of: If I was going to serve a roasted chicken on Sunday, I'd always plan on having something made of leftover chicken on Tuesday -- chicken salad plates with fruit or Vietnamese-ish sandwiches with shredded carrots and cilantro or whatever. My recipe box, which as you can imagine is pretty big, has a separate category for "Leftover Meat."

Likewise, brown rice and polenta are easier and better in the oven, and it's easy to make enough for two meals if you plan ahead.

At first I tried to plan far ahead, but our schedules would change (Monday: yoga night/on our own), and our appetites would be different depending on the season (Wednesday: grill), so I began to stick to a month at a time.

I miss those days. I'm working full time now, and we have a bit of a silent power struggle. I will not work 8 hours and then come home and cook for two adultish people who've been in the house all afternoon. The spouse and the kidlet are on board with this in theory, but in practice cooking is simply not happening (except on the weekends, when I usually make soup on Saturday and pizza on Sunday). They're not used to the responsibility, and I think the actual barrier isn't cooking -- I think it's planning.

Which I really love doing.

Possibly I should offer to make some menu calendars for them!






* As an aside, it's very interesting how the Woman's Day Month of Menus has changed over the years. When I used to read my mom's copy as a kid (in the 1970s), most of the days would just be descriptions. "Pork chops, buttered noodles, roasted winter squash with sage." They assumed you already had a favorite way to cook a pork chop or roast a winter squash. If you look at the Month of Menus today, there's a recipe for every dish.

Also, in the '70s, there was a dessert every day!

Comments

[aerye]

Wow. I am impressed. I pat myself on the back for meal planning if I write a list for the market. Thank god I am not in charge of making sure other people get fed—they would be totally screwed.

[resonant]

Well, you wouldn't do this unless the act of doing the planning was fun for you. There's a whole separate category of people whose approach to meal planning is

1. Go to the grocery store, see what looks good, and buy it.
2. Come home, see how you feel like cooking, and cook.

And I'm sure they eat just as well as I do; they just don't got to make lovely calendars.

I wish I could get paid for making monthly menus. That sounds like fun.

[indywind]

Seconding the impressedness with your planny planning.

I definitely fall in the category of "see what we have lots of or can get cheap, figure out how those things can go together, and cook that" with the occasional added step of prioritizing anything that needs to be used up before it goes bad and is wasted.

[resonant]

It took quite a long time for me to build my cooking skills to the point where I felt confident that I could do that, as opposed to "make a trip out to buy the particular ingredients for this particular dish."

I'm hoping I'll be able to afford a CSA subscription again this summer, because I really felt like that built up my ability to go from ingredients to recipes instead of the other way around.

[travels_in_time]

Thank you very much! I have just about got to the point where I can plan a week at a time, but I love your idea of setting a category for each day. That will make it way simpler to plan even further ahead.

[resonant]

It really does! And if you have a particular area that you want to improve upon, you can assign it a day; for a while I had one day a week for crockpot recipes, and there was another period when one day a week was devoted to "cook something new."

[copracat]

Well, in the 70s there was a dessert on the dinner table every day. I think my dad would have started a revolution if he didn't get his nightly ice cream and tinned peaches.

[resonant]

I remember getting a little glimpse into that when I would read the kidlet my mother's old copy of "The Poky Little Puppy" -- a major plot point revolved around there being chocolate custard one night and strawberry shortcake another and ... I've forgotten what the third dessert was, but it was definitely there.

[giglet]

In our house in the 70s, we seldom got desserts, or seconds, except at Holidays. We never went hungry, but we four kids often had less to eat than we could have wished. Once we all got through college in the 80s, though, *every* family meal included dessert.

[resonant]

My mom has food hangups, so when I was growing up, dessert was an exercise in mixed messages -- mostly no dessert, and then some glorious homemade dish and every bite you eat is watched like a hawk ...

[ellen_fremedon]

Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management has a whole year of recipes for family dinners, as well as suggested dinner party menus for 18, 12, and 6 persons for each month.

[resonant]

Wow, talk about "not how I eat" -- though I wonder if Stewed Eels or Cod's Head and Shoulders would be better than they sound?

Do you know what they mean by having one course "removed by" another? I've always wondered.

[wychwood]

I believe the "remove" thing implies the kind of meal where you have a course, take the leftovers / plates away, then bring the next course in. As opposed to the kind of meal where you shove everything on the table and then eat, while it all goes cold *g*. I believe this is also known as "service à la russe", in comparison to "service à la française". Heyer characters are always having five removes at their dinner parties.

[indywind]

Wychwood is correct. Removes are a little bit like courses in referring to a sequential progression of stuff to eat at one sitting, except a course is a group of dishes that are served together, whereas a remove is a single dish (either single food item, or pre-assembled plateful for each diner) that replaces a previous single dish.

Interesting historical tidbit--the practice and term "remove" in dining only came into use around the late 17th/early18th century, as meals began to be taken in relatively smaller groups (small enough to permit a high servant-to-diner ratio) of relatively more homogenous social status. Before then, meals of multiple foods were served in courses. Whereas a wealthy host in the Georgian era might show off (the coordination of their table-servants as well as their cook and provisions) with a dinner of several removes, a wealthy host in the high Middle Ages or Renaissance would not increase the number of courses to impress their guests, but increase the number and variety of dishes within each course, so a mere 2-course supper might contain 20 or more dishes (though in larger gatherings, not all the dishes would be available to all the diners--the best parts would be offered first to those with the highest status).
Dessert also wasn't a separate thing before roughly the Elizabethan era--the many dishes per course of a Medieval/Renaissance dinner would include sweets as well as savories and others that could go either way; the distinction wasn't particularly meaningful at the time. A typical end to a meal might be wine and cheese, nuts, and fruit.

/amateur food historian

[resonant]

So cool! Now I want to think of food-historian questions to ask.

I read an article in the New Yorker once that said that in Tudor times "sweets" would be so delicately sweetened that our sugar-saturated palates wouldn't register them as sweet at all. I wondered about that, because they had apples, and we have apples, and apples still taste sweet to us.

[indywind]

Whether the New Yorker author's opinion is "true" would, I guess, depend--on one's personal taste and expectations of "sweets" (I don't like the same degree of sweet that I used to) and also of the individual historical sweet recipe -- then as now, some are sweeter than others, and it's possible the New Yorker author was comparing not apples to apples, but more like Graham Crackers to Little Debbie Cakes.
Things involving large quantities of sugar were mostly available only to the middle and upper classes, but those that could have it, did. And used it liberally enough to indicate the taste was as enjoyed then as now. And their cooks left recipes, so we can try their tastes for ourselves and make up our own minds.

If you want to look at or try out some historical recipes, without the trouble of trying to read facsimiles of old handwritten recipes and translate the language and measurements, there are collections of historical recipes redacted for modern use. Online, you might try godecookery.com--though note that the domain contains many sites related to historically-inspired cookery, not all of which are equally rigorously researched.

For a sampling of the historical sweet-spectrum, perhaps try:
OMGSWEET: gingerbrede
mildly sweet: Prince-Biskit (the primary source, "Hugh Platt's Delights for Ladies" is from the first quarter of the 17th century, IIRC)
could be sweet or savory: Samartard, cottage-cheese fritters
a not-a-sweet seasoned with sugar: An Excellent Boiled Salad (original source is from 1615; the parboiling step isn't necessary with the tender young spinach one can get in the modern supermarket--but do parboil if you get sturdy mature spinach from a CSA or farmer's market, or if you substitute chard or beet greens)

[greyeyes]

One day when I have a job with a steady schedule, I will totally do this! I really like the idea of category days and making lists of what I do know how to make so I'm not starting completely from scratch. Thanks!

[resonant]

The difficulty I was having, when I first started that plan, was that by the time I got home from a full day of work, thinking of something to eat was just more effort than I had the energy for. And then I'd buy things at the grocery on the vaguest of whims ("Look, it's spinach. I like spinach. I'll buy some.") and they'd go bad before I thought of anything to do with them.

[greyeyes]

That's exactly what keeps happening to me! With spinach! And other things. I really do need to do some planning and recipe listing so at least I have a few ideas for when I go "oh, that spinach is looking rough."

[carolyn_claire]

Back in the days when I used to cook for the four of us, I did the monthly planning thing, in part because living 20 min from town with family members going in every possible direction all day, large, infrequent shopping trips were the easier way to go. I liked the planning part, too (a lot more than the dishes) and wanted to get into seasonal cooking/freezing but could never keep an appropriately sized freezer running long enough to do it. No that it's just the two of us eating is usually more scrounging- than cooking-based.

[resonant]

All along my plan assumed two smallish grocery trips a week; going less often would definitely take more planning. Now, when I was in college and only cooking for myself, I can remember going grocery shopping and then coming home and immediately packaging up things like meat into single-serving bags and freezing them; I guess if you shop less often, you have another chore that's tacked onto the end of shopping.

[out_there]

Wow. That is a lot of variety over the weeks.

Personally, I can remember our meal planning as a result of financial and time constraints.

As a kid, when Mum and dad were both working, there were a lot of casseroles and stews had at nights (since they could be cooked on weekends and frozen). Later, when it was just mum and she was studying (and on a budget), there were a lot of processed meat meals (sausages, meat pies, mince, the really cheap frozen hamburgers that mostly taste like cardboard, with occasional sliced beef/steak) and lots of potatoes/spaghetti/rice as filler.

I can remember when financial circumstances improved and steak/beef and chicken became the meat staples.

Now, as two adults with more disposable income and a dietary plan to shed the extra kilos, we mostly eat smaller portions of chicken, turkey and fish with larger portions of greens (and carb-rich fillers are the very occasional treat).

But the actual meal variety themselves? There's a range of about 8-10 meals that get recycled week after week. (Growing up, it was the same. Over the fortnight, there'd always be a handful of repeat meals. But never something as structured as fish every Sunday.) It's funny, but it has shaped how I approach cooking. Cooking is something necessary for the evening meal: it should be simple and known and able to be cooked within 30 minutes.

[resonant]

What I consider a "normal" variety of meals is definitely shaped by what I grew up with! My mother is a fantastic cook (despite a lot of food and weight hangups), and also, I think, a person with a lot more intelligence and creativity than keeping house and taking care of kids gave her much of an outlet for, but cooking was one creative thing she got to do. So we had a wonderful variety of food -- seriously, I should ask her how she remembers this, but the way I remember it, we would rarely get the same dish twice in any given year.

[lobelia321]

Wow, that is amazing! And the link to Woman's Day is amazing, too! And you are the most amazing thing of all! When the children were younger, I had a weekly plan sort of like this but I don't think I ever had 24 recipes at my fingertips, only about 10. To this day, we rotate every week, sometimes more often... (Yes, not much variety.) Now I do keep recipes on my iphone so when I'm shopping and haven't brought a list I can consult. I'm also very impressed with the way you are refusing to cook after 8 hours of work. I worked all the time the kids were little so would always work 8 hours and then cook. It's now come back to bite me in the bum because the marriage is on the rocks but that's another story. So go you. But I think it's right what you say re planning. If they had a plan, or you gave it to them, with simple recipes and a shopping list, they might cook??

The 70s, eh.

[lobelia321]

P.S. Also I never come to DW except to answer a crosspost. But you don't crosspost. So today I happened to look and I'm so glad I did! I've missed you!

[resonant]

Wow, I didn't realize they weren't crossposting any more. DW always says it's going to attempt to crosspost.

[lobelia321]

I see some people's crossposts but I never see yours...?? :-(

Also, how is the menu thing going??

[resonant]

So sorry about the marriage thing (and I've missed you too).

I try not to get too mad about the food -- either cooking will happen or it won't, and if it doesn't, I'll find something to eat regardless. One thing I've always remembered is a story the Tech Goddess told me: one night her kids were disrespectful of something she cooked, and she got mad, and her husband (who cooked more often than she did) said, "It's just dinner. It's going to happen more than three hundred times this year."

[lobelia321]

I see that we had a flurry about 2 weeks ago and then I never came back... (I slunk off into HP land with visits to LJ, AO3 tumblr; I keep forgetting that DW exists....!! There are so many platforms now.) Also marriage is still crap and HP is welcome escape. I'm depositing all my issues into Dudley and Draco (hm, while aiming to maintain narrative control and an impartial authorial voice... plus being hot. Very hot.)

Who's the Tech Goddess?

[mergatrude]

I think the idea of giving spouse and kidlet menu calendars is a good one. If meals have been so organised in the past and they haven't seen the planning process, I can imagine they might feel daunted with where even to begin. Plus, it's passing on an important executive skill.

The lad is home before I am most days, so he usually prepares something from our stock standards. Weekends are for experimenting, and will often mean I'm grocery shopping with a list, and then get a bunch of texts with ingredients for whatever recipe he's looking at on the internet. And occasionally, I get to cook, too.

[resonant]

I think the spouse always means to cook, but he gets involved in studying and loses track of time, and also he's still in the place that I was in before I did my planning, when I'd stagger into the kitchen tired and hungry and then try to think of something to cook.

The kidlet is a different story -- she's in that transition period where gradually there are more things she does and fewer things that are done for her, and I need to help her with that.

[giglet]

Speaking of kidlet: when t'boy was about 13, he discovered that the ability to cook impressed his schoolmates -- especially the girls, and the parents of the girls. French toast and baking-soda cakes increased his social capital a lot. The side benefit was that he started making dinner at least once a week. Now that he is getting ready to move out, he's filling in the gaps, but I feel like he has a good basic education in vegetarian cooking.

[resonant]

I need to work on that with the kidlet. She can bake very well, well enough to experiment with the recipes, but the only MEAL she can make without supervision is Jane Brody's hippie wholegrain pancakes, and like most beginners she doesn't really think about side dishes, boosting fiber content, etc.

[florahart]

I TRY to have "planned-overs" However, if my kids will eat it, they will eat all of it. Last night I made, for the three of us, beef barley soup. In this soup were:

4 cups of broth plus what I cooked the barley in
1.5 pounds of beef
about 4 or so cooked cups of barley
5 large carrots
4 large celery ribs
half of the largest onion I have ever seen
4 large mushrooms
6ish ounces each of frozen peas and corn
a medium zucchini and a medium yellow crookneck squash
and assorted seasoning stuff

So, I mean, this was a lot of soup. Probably nearly 4 quarts--most of my 5-quart pan. I figured surely this would be lunch for me a few times this week.


...nope. I did have leftovers, which was a miracle, but the leftover amount is probably one lunch worth.

Earlier this week they demolished a 2-pound pork roast of which I had about 3 ounces. Another day I made mac and cheese with veggies in it and breadcrumbs and stuff, filling what I think is a 3.5-quart corningware oval casserole dish to the brim. Leftovers? HAHAHAHAHAHA nope.

So I mean, one of these days, they are going to move out, and I will be able to cook once a week and be JUST FINE, kadhfkhkajsd.

[resonant]

Oh, dear. That would drive me nuts -- I only have one somewhat abstemious spouse and one kidlet who lives mostly on frozen ravioli. The only things that will get eaten as if by locusts are cheese and raisins; I have to hide those if I want to keep them.

It's the only advantage of living with people who can't see anything except what's in the front row of the fridge.

(When the kidlet was very small -- so small that she still confused "you" and "I" in her speech -- she lost something. I said, "Did you look for it? Did you look the way a mom would look?" and she said earnestly, "You yooked and you yooked and you yooked!")

[karenhealey]

I've just moved to a new sharehouse and this is going to be PERFECT, thank you.

[resonant]

That would be an interesting challenge, a sharehouse. I take it you're sharing cooking as well as other chores?

[karenhealey]

We might be working with differing definitions of sharehouse. In this case, the landlady is renting out a couple rooms in her home to me and another person, and we're responsible for our own food shopping, cooking etc. Because she's been here for years and it is her home, storage and pantry space are very limited. So the planning tips you've shared are super helpful, because I can work out what my staples are, and plan to use things up, make best use of leftovers, etc, in a monthly plan. Less deviation means fewer things to sit around and rot!

[resonant]

Oh, I see. I had never seen the term before, and I was thinking you were sharing a house and all chores thereof. But you're right that more planning = less wasted space and less wasted food.

[jedusaur]

This actually inspired me to organize my recipes and start planning meals, which I've been vaguely intending to do for a long time, so thanks for the butt-kick! (I already knew the category-per-day trick--Mom tried her darndest to stick to a similar schedule when I was a teen, but there were two other teens and a baby in the house along with my stepdad, and among us were a vegan, a vegetarian, and a person who did not consider a meal complete without meat... so cooking for the whole pile of us every night was a hell of a challenge.)

[resonant]

I have the greatest respect for vegetarians, but I'm not one, and I remember when I was a teenager the way one of my friends completely held her family hostage by constantly changing what she would and would not eat and watching them scramble to cook for her (at least that's the way it looked to me).

So from an early age the kidlet has understood that becoming vegetarian = volunteering to do a lot of the cooking.

[jedusaur]

There's a big difference between the constant-diet-change thing and making a single decision to become vegetarian. Not that you should be expected to cook different food for everyone like my mom did--or, indeed, that you should be expected to cook at all for anyone who's capable of cooking for themselves--and I'm sure you didn't mean to phrase it like that, but the way you just equated the two does not feel to me like respect. :/ Though I may well be oversensitive from years of having my choices mocked by the aforementioned member of my household who didn't consider a meal complete without meat.

[resonant]

I don't know what it's like to have my food choices judged all the time -- well, no, that's not quite true; I'm a woman, after all, and a fat one at that, but it's a matter of degree, I guess.

[giglet]

You know... You have this skill (of meal planning and having lots of variety in your meals). There are people who will pay for that. I don't know the details, but when my Dad started cooking for himself and my Mom, he really just needed someone to tell him what to cook and what to buy, and he found an online service to do that every week.

Just a thought.

If you could tie the expensive ingredients to sales at the local grocery store, that would be hugely useful. Or veg from the CSA.

[resonant]

I looked into that, actually, but there are quite a lot of people already doing this on the internet. There's also the difficulty that I didn't develop my own recipes and I don't have the right to distribute them.

On the other hand, I wonder whether maybe a local CSA provider would want a week's worth of menu suggestions (without recipes) using that week's produce in exchange for a discounted subscription? I might email some of them and ask.