November 08, 2007planning your mealsi am about to reveal a side of myself to you that very few people have seen. that is how close i feel we are. this is how ready i am to share myself with you. i am seriously organized about food. every week, on thursday or friday, i look at my produce delivery from that week and i see if there is any vegetable or fruit that i have in abundance that needs to be cooked soon, like within days. leeks, say, or kale. i run through a mental list of favorite recipes that include that ingredient—or if i want to try something new, i open my favorite cookbooks to the index and look for something i haven't made yet that sounds particularly delicious. then i think about recipes that i've been craving but haven't made recently. i start making a shopping list in backpackit and putting stickies in my cookbook as i do so. but i'm also extremely frugal! so if the cream sauce that i'm making calls for fresh sage, i'll look up some other recipes that call for fresh sage so i can use up the sage before it goes bad. after i've gathered together 6-10 recipes and i've made a list of all the grocery items that i would need, i nix the recipes that have the most "niche" ingredients—ingredients that i would have to buy for that recipe alone, that might be kind of costly, and i won't get a ton of use out of them in the near future. will i eventually make these? probably, but it might be for a special occasion rather than everyday eating. hopefully what i'm left with is 3-4 recipes' worth of ingredients that tally up to under $30 or so. then i copy this list to paper (what i really need is this planner); i add our staples to the grocery list; i go grocery shopping within the next two days, and i slowly start working my way through those recipes over the course of the week. there are only two of us, so with leftovers (and my recent penchant for freezing), when thursday rolls around, i'm ready to think about grocery shopping again. how does it work at your casa?
posted by joanna @ 6:10 PM
15 Comments:
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you have pretty much just described exactly what i do. ha! only we don't get a produce delivery, so i do it the opposite direction. i go through my books and bookmarks, decide what i'm craving, make my lists, then hit the farmers market and the hippie mart. this week i decided i'm making seitan stroganoff, and later pakoras and curried split pea soup. YEAHH.
what about spontaneous urged/cravings to make something?or like you really want something out of the blue or it's been on your mind a couple days?
i'm bad and never plan anything,but then again i'm shopping for one person and if i cook it's only for me since i only live with my brother and i could cook for him but...
anyways kudos on being so organized.
wow, you are organized. that will come in very handy when the little one arrives. i try to use all of my produce before it goes bad. that's about as organized as it gets around here. i mostly cook whatever i am craving.
i make something based on the produce we have. dazee comes home and eats whatever is in the fridge from five days ago. that's how it works here!
awful.
xo
kittee
I really want to do more meal planning. I just basically go to the farmers market and buy whatever looks good, and I keep tofu, tempeh, spices, beans, rice, etc on hand at all times.
That's a cool notepad. Thank you for sharing your organizational system. I don't have the gift, and it's always nice to discover how this organization thing works for other people. I wander through the farmers market each week grabbing whatever strikes my fancy and then wind up having to go to the grocery store almost everyday for odds and ends that I've forgotten the previous day. It's not an effective system. But I'm working on it.
It's funny that I'm a very organized person and, yet, my cooking system is more like Trina's. I make a list of the staples that I've run out of, then go to Trader Joe's, buy them and anything else that looks good. Then I go through the indexes of my favorite cookbooks and figure out what to do w/ them! I really like your method, though. :)
when i have sudden MUST HAVE RIGHT NOW cravings, i just run to wild oats and make it that day. but that's very rare. usually when i crave something, i crave it for several days in a row before i give in, so it just gets added to the list.
or like yesterday when i craved cake, and i went to vita and had a slice of sweetpea's irish oatmeal cake.
Spooky. Except for the produce delivery (and the fact that I'm the opposite of high-tech and make my grocery list in Notepad), that's almost my exact process. Like, to the day. Thursday is "start thinking about food for the week" day.
ok, so mamakim has an ugly-ass planner from Plan-It (get it? planet?) Moms that has a grocery list to the side of the planner. during church is usually when she seems to do her list making...it's ugly but she puts stickers all over it so it end up looking like something from middle school. she usually finds them super cheap after the new year at b&n.
Pretty much every night I read cookbooks. If something jumps out at me, I'll mark it. Then I'll write down a menu for the week. Planning which meals are easy for the hectic days and which meals need more time on the relaxed days. I try to use ingredients for more than one dish. Farmer's market use to really effect my menu but I don't have the luxury of going right now. Once I"m on maternity leave from work, I plan on going every Wednesday to my favorite farmer's market. I'll probably go nuts the first visit!
holy shit i love the irish oatmeal cake from piece of cake or sweet pea.i sampled both at new seasons after seeing it in the display case at veganopolis with katie and becoming infatuated with it.
i guess you're lucky since you're in portland and pretty much whatever you're craving you can get and get it vegan.jerk.
Well, I usually start asking my husband around 10 or 11 am (over IM or something) what he wants for dinner, and then we'll hem and haw for a while, and eventually we'll come up with something, and if we need an ingredient or two, we'll hit the store on the way home. Unless, of course, we have some produce in the house that I know needs to be used up.
I should probably meal plan. But I almost never want to eat planned food, for some reason...now, if I had a chef who meal planned, I'd be happy to eat planned food!
I'm quite similar! I always rank the veggies & fruits by what needs to be consumed, then work on recipes, hoping some of them will utilize multiple items with less shelf time. Also, recipes I won't have to go shopping to make are an added bonus & most likely to be made, unless I'm dying to try something new.
I am sooo glad to find someone else that's as organized about food as I am. My friends all make fun of me! Every two weeks (that's how often I shop), I sit down with my cookbooks and pick 4-5 recipes...then I make three lists (what I get at Kroger, what I can get at Wild Oats, and when in season, what's available at the Farmer's Market).
After shopping, I plan weekly menus based on what produce will go bad first. I save the not-so-producy recipes for the second week. I post my little menus on my kitchen bulletin board....and I live alone, so it's just for me.
I don't feel so crazy anymore! Thanks!