Thursday, October 18, 2012

Meal Binder

I'm a bit obsessive.  I'm a little organized.  And this little project is the most obsessive and organized I have ever done.  And because I'm rather proud of it, I thought I'd share.
I hate preparing for grocery shopping.  I don't like to go more than a couple of times a month, so I try to do one big trip and another smaller trip later on in the month to replenish perishables.  This way, I'm not as tempted to buy a bunch of stuff every time I go in because I need one quick thing.
Anyway, I used to sit down a week before the "big trip" with a printed calendar of the following month.  I would write in meals, trying to get meals with similar ingredients close together so I wouldn't be wasteful with leftovers.  I would factor in all the times we would be gone, then I would try to remember which meals needed what as I wrote out the list.  Some people thought I was organized and crazy then.  They would probably have me institutionalized now.
Fed up with the system of spending a couple of evenings trying to think of meals (because, while I successfully feed my husband and I every day each month, I for some reason can only think of a few recipes I've made when I need to think of more) and make up a grocery list, I had an idea.
First, I got an allrecipes account.  Not a huge fan of paying for a service I probably could have done on my own but I took the $20 for 2 year plunge for convenience.  I started making my own recipes and saving others like mad.
Second, I started making weekly menus based on three things; season, prep time and main ingredient.  For example, Fall Chicken Recipes.  I find that it's cheaper to cook a whole chicken and use leftovers all week in other recipes, same with beef and turkey.  So, I went through the recipes I had under chicken and found ones that seemed like good fall recipes (some grilling, some baked, some salads).  Then I took my schedule into account and applied them to the night we would most likely eat them--I make homemade chicken noodle soup but it takes a couple of hours, so it wouldn't work on a day I work.  This doesn't mean we will exclusively eat these dinners or that we will eat them in order.  It just ensures I have the ingredients for all of those meals and we can have them whenever we want.  I've already used some ingredients from various recipes to make something not even listed, but it sure helps! 
Most seasons have multiple menus for main ingredients.  So, I have a "Fall Chicken Recipes 1" and "Fall Chicken Recipes 2".
I printed all of these menus and put them in a binder based on season.

This is sounding a lot more complicated than I meant it too.

So, for the next two months, I will probably do all of my "Winter 1" recipes in November, and "Winter 2" in December, picking a few to repeat through February.

I will just put those menus in the front of the binder, go to allrecipes.com, have them make a grocery list for me for those recipes, email it to my phone and go shopping.  I usually go through the list once before I go to the store, deleting the things I already have and adding breakfast and lunch foods. 

While I make dinner, I just pull down my binder, open to the recipe I'm making, and the directions are already there.

I will slowly add more recipes to the list as I learn of them.  But for now, I have the whole next year covered at least. 

Think I'm crazy yet?



2 comments:

  1. We don't think you're crazy yet. It's much too late. We've always known you're crazy.

    Even though I'll admit that I could use you to clean off the book shelf in my kitchen, which is stuffed with computer printouts, index cards, and snippets of paper, all in a mess, of my favorite recipes. : )

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