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One of the cookbook shelves

I’ve been sharing my three favorite methods of menu planning to answer the plea for help from reader JellyB. On Tuesday, I tried to explain my index card method, on Thursday I described my spiral notebook method and today I leap fearlessly into the 21st century.

Until 2009, I was the proud owner of a succession of several very overworked Palm Tungstens. I mean, these things got more of a workout than my brain most days, and they were nearly as important to my daily functioning. The very best thing my Palm did was manage my menus and shopping lists. The free Handyshopper program was such an amazing blessing.

When my last Palm died and I couldn’t afford to replace it, I tried other programs like Computer Cuisine, MasterCook, CookWare, MacGourmet on my Mac, always taken in by the idea that I can click a recipe and the shopping list is created automatically. My response? Eh. They are all good, but none meet my stringent qualifications, especially when it comes to combining ingredients on the shopping list. 32 entries for “a teaspoon of butter” just doesn’t do me much good in the dairy aisle, and carrying a seven-page grocery list is just silly. Adding my own recipes to some of those programs was agonizingly difficult.

These days, I use iCal, the native calendar program of the Mac for keeping track of my menus. I have a separate calendar for menus, and four repeating events: Breakfast, Lunch, Prep and Dinner. Each week I add the recipe name and any cookbook page numbers to the corresponding entry. There’s even a place to put in a URL if my recipe is online. With the calendar open I can easily go back in time and make a note under Prep to soak and sprout beans, feed my sourdough starter, soak the rice or whatever other prep needs to be done beforehand. I can set reminders to send me an email if I need to start something at a certain time. iCal makes it very easy to print only the days and items I want to print each week, and a printed menu hangs on my refrigerator. iCal also syncs to my iPod, so I can carry my menus with me. It also has the benefit of storing my past menus, a strong point form the spiral notebook method.

But that’s only about a third of the job isn’t it? What about keeping track of my favorite recipes? I have a lot of cookbooks. Mostly they live on a couple shelves, but there are a few that just stay out on my counter all the time. Nourishing Traditions is one of those that lives on a cookbook stand in the kitchen. I’ve started finally outgrowing my fear of cooking and have been bolder, actually writing in my cookbooks lately. I’ll make notes about recipes, what to try next time, how easy a recipe is, if something didn’t work or should become a standard.

Usually, I’ll grab a cookbook off the shelf and choose an entire week’s menus from that one book. Next week I’ll pick another cookbook. If I have leftover slots, something from Nourishing Traditions usually fills in. I pretty much know from experience which cooks recipes run more expensive. For example, I love Rachael Ray’s recipes, but her long ingredient lists can be very expensive to cook, so I choose from them rarely. By rotating my cookbooks like that, we have the variety we crave while still enjoying recipes that have become favorites.

And then there’s the shopping list. True confession time. Until Handyshopper works on the iPod oS, I won’t bother putting my list on a handheld device. There just isn’t a program out there that does what I need it to do, and I’ve tried most of them. So, I write my shopping list by hand each and every week. On lined paper, I separate items by aisle (or in my case, location) with groupings like “farmers market”, “health food store”, and “Kroger.” I keep my list in pencil, making hash marks for things that repeat like onions, pounds of butter, dozens of eggs, etc.

As for actually choosing my weekly menu? That’s a little more abstract. I start out adding in the “given” meals (iCal is a whiz at repeating items). Saturday morning I sleep in and the kids make themselves cereal. Once a week won’t kill them, I promise them. Tuesday night we clean out the refrigerator for Wednesday’s shopping day. Wednesday, exhausted from shopping and running kids hither and yon is our eat out dinner.

Then I add in errands, any “Mom’s Taxi” duties and field trips we have scheduled for the week. This way I know if I have a lunch to pack the night before or have extra time to cook something special.

In a week, we’ll have three egg breakfasts, either pancakes or waffles once and usually a muffin breakfast. Some weeks I’ll do a smoothie breakfast.

For lunches, I plan two sandwich days, usually a meat sandwich (my farmer has EPIC pastrami) and a salad sandwich. We usually have a Mexican lunch, either quesadillas or burritos. In spring and summer we’ll have a salad lunch, in fall and winter those are soup lunches.

I’ll usually make a roast chicken once a week. Sometimes I’ll make stock instead and use the meat in a recipe. Most weeks in summer we’ll have a crockpot beef or pork roast. I try to make fish once a week, almost always salmon, since that’s what we all like. Occasionally I’ll do shrimp or cod instead. The days that are left are where I get crazy with organ meats, casseroles, new recipes and old favorites. We make ice cream in summer when we get back from church on Saturday nights, and I usually plan a dessert for fish night to induce reluctant eaters to at least try.

And that’s my gold medal menu planning method! It’s eclectic, it’s old and new-fashioned, and it works for me! So, JellyB, did that answer your question?

Reader JellyB emailed me and asked for some specific suggestions on planning menus each week. On Tuesday, I outlined my third-favorite method, the one that got a bronze medal by my estimation. It required lots of index cards. The silver medal goes to a method that uses spiral notebooks instead.

Spiral Notebook by rogergordon, on Flickr

Growing up, we had pretty boring meals. Mom was a great cook, but fell into the “If it’s Tuesday, it must be meatloaf” rut for a good long while. I guess it was handy for us kids because we always knew which days of the week to fish for dinner invitations from friends! And it certainly was handy for Mom. Each week she knew exactly how much ground beef to buy, when to defrost it and what it would be transformed into when the dinner bell rang.

But, I’m a spoiled brat and so is every other member of my immediate family. We love variety. Lots and lots of variety. I have meals that we dearly love that we might only eat twice a year. Now, that’s not to say that I create a gourmet feast each and every night. There will usually be one roast chicken a week, and possibly one roast beef or pork a week. Leftover meat will go into another meal. And our breakfasts are usually pretty routine.

All that variety can be exhausting to plan. Hubby asked me one menu-planning-day years ago, “Why do you reinvent the wheel every week? If you just saved your menus from week to week with their shopping lists, you’d only have to do this once and you’d have next year’s menus done.”

It sounded like a brilliant plan, so I gave it a shot. Each week, instead of writing out my menus on a piece of paper to be thrown away at the end of the week, I wrote them in a spiral notebook. The page following would be the shopping list (including staples) for that set of menus. I could photocopy the shopping list to cross off and add to before the trip each week (what, you don’t have a photocopier in your house?) and voila…done.

PROS of the spiral notebook method:

• Making one set of menus for the entire year to be reused year after year is sheer brilliance, at least in theory. Hours were suddenly added back into my week. Of course, you have to keep track of that notebook and be sure it doesn’t fall into crayon-wielding hands.
• This method lends itself quite handily to seasonal eating. I know when tomatoes, corn and winter squash will be in season, and I can plan those foods for those times of the year. It helps me stay honest even when I’m craving peaches in March.
• If your schedule is very routine, this method also works well. For example, if you know you will be gone every single Wednesday for the forseeable future at lunchtime, you can plan one lunch to pack every single week. You can have one crockpot dinner every single week on the night you are out late, or have fish every Friday. Whatever floats your boat.
• It is, to some degree, flexible. You can plan muffins to go with your dinner and then (if you remember) make them blueberry, apple or cinnamon muffins depending on the available seasonal ingredients and your cravings for that day. Of course, you have to remember to put the extra items on the shopping list, though.

CONS of the spiral notebook method:

• Every so often, there’s a stinker. One meal that doesn’t meet your needs, taste as good as you remember or that needs a seasonal ingredient that just isn’t in season yet (or was flooded out). White out can fix the menu on a permanent basis. Changing the shopping list is not quite that simple, as each ingredient needs to be adjusted separately. Shoot. Now that week is a mess and needs to be rewritten.
• What if I don’t feel like eating beef stew because the thermometer hasn’t dropped even though it’s November? What if the pricey veal that was on sale last year at this time isn’t on sale this time? What if my farmer runs out of chicken (it’s been known to happen)? Little things tend to throw this system off if you let them. A certain balance of flexibility and rigidity helps. I was never able to master the balance, though, and this method soon fell into disfavor. It was just too much like being told what to cook each week. Bo-ring.

Come back on Saturday and I’ll share my gold standard, the menu planning method I use now.

I got an email from a reader over the weekend asking for some real nuts and bolts advice on menu planning. I’ve done it a dozen different ways in an effort to find what worked for me. I’ll post my three favorite ways this week.

When work is play... by Christmas w/a K, on Flickr

My third-favorite way was really versatile and handy when I first started out. I had gift subscriptions to a several different magazines (Taste of Home, Gourmet and Cooks Illustrated) and I wanted to try everything each month! Our house was already knee-deep in tiny pieces of paper the little ones generated, so I didn’t want to risk clipping recipes. I kept the magazines whole instead and filed each in its own binder with these cool little plastic things that held the magazines securely.

As I found recipes that I thought I’d like, I’d make an index card for them. I color coded the index cards with different colors for different meals or courses. On the front, I’d note the name of the recipe, it’s location (Taste of Home March 2008 page 36) it’s cooking method (stove, crockpot, oven at 400°, etc.), the amount of time it took (prep: 40 minutes, 1 hour 30 minutes unwatched, 5 minutes intense stirring, etc.) and notes about what it would taste particularly good served with. I also ended up noting on the front if I served that particular dish to guests and when. On the back I noted all the ingredients (even staples) that were required for the dish. I found a used holder like this one for my index cards at a school’s rummage sale and I was off!

Each week I’d choose index cards for each meal, and make a shopping list from the items on the back of the cards. I’d separate out the cards into breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner in the holder. After the grocery shopping was done, I’d defrost whatever meat I wanted to use for the next day or two and freeze the rest. Each morning I’d get up and choose that day’s cards based on the prep time and activities for the day and put those cards on the top row of the holder.

Recipes could be rated by how easy they were to make, if any family members LOVED or HATED the dish, and how expensive it was to create. These were noted on the front of the card as well. Cards for unpopular or overly expensive dishes were thrown out.

When my magazines arrived, I always had fresh ideas to make cards for, and my card stack grew very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that eventually I had a hard time using this method because there were just too many cards to flip through each week!

PROS of the card system:

• Keeping notes on each recipe freed up my memory. I didn’t have to try to remember if it was this version of meatloaf that we liked or if it was the other one.
• Noting cooking times and methods on the cards made it easy to combine cooking for multiple dishes, saving electricity and energy (mine!)
• Having each week’s cards all in one place and handy kept me from having to try to scramble at the last minute for what to cook each day. I knew I had the ingredients on hand and how early I’d have to start each dish.
• Listing even the staples on the back of each card meant I never ran out of salt. If my supply was even starting to get low on a staple, I added it to the shopping list. It served as a kind of reminder to check everything each week.
• Once a recipe was made, I could file its card in the back of the deck so we didn’t repeat the same meals over and over.

CONS of the card system:

• While this method worked really well for me when I was first starting out, I outgrew it very quickly. Sorting through 20 or 30 cards took minutes. Sorting through 200 or 300 could take hours.
• The cards would frequently be spilled either from their file box or the card holder.
• Cards would mysteriously go missing. Others would mysteriously move to the front of the box. I always assumed it was my children’s way of “voting” thumbs up or down on a meal!

I hope I was able to describe this method well enough that you get the idea. Come back Thursday to read about the Silver Method of Menu Planning!