Meal planning algorithm: A request from a friend.

Step 1.  Take a good hard look at your family’s shopping, pantry-stocking, and dining habits.  Ask yourself the following questions:

• Ideally, would I visit the grocery store once every two weeks?  once a week?  twice a week?
• If I never went shopping again, how many days would pass before I would be unable to serve a balanced meal to my family from the ingredients in my pantry and freezer?
• Do I like to know exactly what I’m going to make for dinner every day of the week, or do I like to decide on the spur of the moment?  And never mind what I like, does that actually work?   
  Does it depend on what’s going on in your life that day?   
• Who does most of the cooking?  Who does most of the shopping? 
• Do I like to work with a fairly limited repertoire of meals or do I like to make something new every week?  Is this working?  Would people in my family like to see less repetition?  Or am I working too hard and maybe I need to develop a reliable repertoire?

Step 2.  Considering your other obligations, decide on a fairly regular schedule for grocery shopping.  "Every other Wednesday morning" will do fine.  Or, "Saturday mornings."  If you shop more than once a week, designate one of those trips as the primary shopping trip. 

Step 3.  Whatever day you do your primary grocery trip, decree that the day before that will be your meal-planning day.   Then, begin to think of your weeks as beginning on grocery-shopping day and ending on meal-planning day.

Example 3-1:  In my house, my husband does the grocery shopping twice each week:  Saturday morning he does the main weekly trip to the grocery store, plus a Friday-afternoon stop at the co-0p to pick up fresh fish for dinner that night plus things that we can only get at the co-op.   Ergo, my planning day is Friday.   I think of my weeks as beginning on Saturday and ending on Friday.

Example 3-2:  If you shop every other Wednesday, then you must plan two weeks out, and your planning day is every other Tuesday.  Think of weeks as beginning on Wednesday and ending on Tuesday, and take them two at a time.

NOTE.   Usually you will plan meals on meal-planning day (i.e., the end of your imaginary week) for the days beginning with grocery-shopping day (i.e., the beginning of your next imaginary week).  If it’s not meal-planning day yet, don’t let that stop you from getting a head start.   For now, make a plan that skips over the days from now to meal-planning day.

Step 4.  Go take a quick glance in your freezer, refrigerator, and pantry, just to see if there’s anything in there that you ought to try to use.  No sense buying a chicken if you’ve already got one in the freezer.   And if you have a boatload of ground beef, maybe you should plan something that uses it.   Don’t get sidetracked listing all the food in your pantry.  Just make a mental note of one or two things that you won’t have to buy, because you’ve already got it.   

Step 5.  Gather materials:  two pieces of paper, a pencil, your appointment calendar or planner, and something that inspires you to think of things to cook.  For me, a couple of random cookbooks will do; for you, it may be a diet plan or a foodie magazine.   If nothing inspiring is at hand, don’t worry about it.

Step 6.  One sheet of paper is the meal plan.   Make a column on the left side that lists days of the upcoming week (or two, if that’s your plan), and — because you are no longer a slave to convention — you begin with grocery-shopping day.  Since I shop on Saturdays, the first column reads

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Step 7.  Consult your planner.  Next to each day of the upcoming week, make a note about what’s going on that day that might affect your dinner situation.  Husband out of town?  Inviting anyone to dinner?  Swimming lessons that evening?  Going to do grocery shopping in the late afternoon?  Need to work on something in the evening so clean-up has to be minimal?  Planning to spend the whole day at a friend’s house and not come back till four-thirty?  Expecting the kids to be extra needy?  Expecting your day to be extra relaxed with plenty of time? 

Mine for this week looks like this:

Saturday – shop

Sunday – friends coming over

Monday – home all day

Tuesday – at Melissa’s all day

Wednesday – not sure if Mark will be here for dinner

Thursday – need to send dinner home with Hannah

Friday – can’t make a big mess

Step 8.  Now go down that list and think what kind of cooking makes sense for that day.  If you’re going to be gone from the house all day, then a slow-cooker meal is a good idea.  If you would like to make something that takes a long time, then it should happen on a day when you’re home and have time to do it.   If you don’t eat meat on Fridays, or try not to do unnecessary work on Sunday, then you should figure that in.   If you like to save time by eating a grocery-store rotisserie chicken sometimes, shouldn’t that be on the day you plan to go to the grocery store?  Make more notes.  Note that you’re not yet writing down the menu, just narrowing down the kinds of things you want to do.  For example, :

Saturday – shop – pick up rotisserie chicken

Sunday – friends coming over, need to make side dishes only

Monday – home all day – anything ok

Tuesday – at Melissa’s all day – slow cooker

Wednesday – not sure if Mark will be here for dinner –  order pizza with salad

Thursday – need to send dinner home with Hannah – some kind of casserole

Friday – can’t make a big mess – eat up leftovers in fridge

Step 9.  Now you start the menu plan.  Label the next column "Dinner."  In that column, consulting your inspiration sources if you need them, start writing down what you’re going to make for dinner each day.   Include the side dishes, but you need not get very specific; I might write "oven roasted green beans," but I often write something like "some yellow vegetable" or "some kind of frozen greens."   As you write down menu items, list needed ingredients — even if they are just "some green vegetable" — on the other piece of paper, which will be the grocery list.  (Writing the meal plan and the grocery list on the same piece of paper is just asking to lose your meal plan in the checkout line.)

Step 10.  Next to each evening’s dinner, you will plan the next day’s breakfast and lunch menu.   Why do it that way?  Efficient planning of expected leftovers, if any.  So the next column is the list of days of the week — shifted by one.  Next to Saturday’s dinner write Sunday morning, next to Sunday’s dinner write Monday morning, etc.   The columns to the right of that will be breakfasts,  lunches, and (if you like to plan them) snacks or tea-times or cocktails or whatever else needs planning.

Step 11.  How you plan breakfasts and lunches depends largely on your family’s style.   In my house I like to make pancakes for breakfast once a week, and the rest of the time it works okay for me to  serve eggs or toast or cold cereal, which we always have on hand, depending on how I’m feeling when I wake up.  So I plan the pancakes but leave the rest of the week "blank."  For lunch, I have a limited repertoire of sandwich- and canned-soup-based meals that I make for children.   So I typically run down the "lunch" column scribbling "pb&j/fruit" or "quesadillas/fruit" or "tuna salad/crackers" without much thought.  The important thing is that the ingredients necessary for these lunches get onto the grocery list, and that I know what I have to make each day.  If you like to cook a hot lunch every day, do so with an eye on the list of dinners — you might be able to save time and effort by, say, planning chicken soup the day after you make roast chicken for dinner.

Step 12.  Hang the meal plan on the fridge.  Take the grocery list and check it against the contents of the pantry, adding staples that you’re low on and removing items you already have.

Next day, you’re ready to shop.

If you have a gap between now and the grocery trip — plan extra meals using what you have in your house already.  Chances are good you can make spaghetti sauce or something each day from what’s in your pantry, especially if — like the friend who inspired me to write this post — you’re the type who can make five weeks of balanced (if oddly creative) meals without going to the grocery store.

There are some other ideas you can adapt to make this algorithm work even better.  For example, you can save your menu plans from week to week and use them to remind you of meals you like to cook.  I used to have a list I made of all the kinds of produce carried by our grocery store; it would remind me that, when we are sick of carrots, I could make parsnips or rutabagas instead.  Eventually, I used Excel to print up sheets that had a grocery-store form on one side and a meal-planning form on the other (I make each week’s grocery list on the back of last week’s menu plan).

After you get into the meal planning habit, you may discover that you are better off making room for a "wild card" meal or two each week.   I typically plan only five meals for every seven days, because when I plan seven it seems that I don’t actually cook seven, and some of the stuff goes to waste.    We’d have too many leftovers one night, or we’d decide on a whim to go out to dinner.    This works best if you always have in mind a couple of "Plan B" meals that can be made quickly from the staples in your pantry if it turns out you do need to cook.  Then instead of  "My plans fell through, I didn’t plan dinner, I don’t know what to make," your situation is "My plans fell through, I didn’t plan dinner, and that makes this chili night."  These also come in handy when you discover you forgot to defrost the roast or turn on the slow cooker.