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.

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