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?

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