What's Cookin', Good Lookin'?: Our Meal Planning Process

I just read an email from a coworker who's facing many of the same challenges Dan & I went through a couple years back. Every night was a scramble to figure out what to eat, and he would end up running to the store nearly every night to grab what we needed. We weren’t eating well, and our health was definitely impacted. We were also spending way too much for way too little.

Thanks to Dan’s natural organizational skills and discipline, he has successfully created a system that is working well for us. I thought I'd share it here:

Each Thursday or Friday night we sit down with some cookbooks and the internet and plan meals for the following Saturday-Friday week. We start by looking through cookbooks and check out the ‘What’s Fresh’ listings for the U-District Farmers Market, and make a wish list of at least 5 dishes that sound good, trying to pick things that use seasonal veggies, meats, and seafood.
Then, we write down a list of the days of the week, and make note of any special events that might require special planning – for example, nights where I might be late getting home or we have a birthday dinner get marked.
Next, we decide which dishes will work best for each day, taking into account how tired we might be and how much time each dish will take (we pick quick & easy meals for Mondays, and usually pick something that takes some time for Sunday dinner). We also consider the freshness of the ingredients, and try to do recipes that will use quick to spoil items on Sunday/Monday.
As the last step of planning, we go through the list of dishes, cross referencing the recipes, to make a grocery list for the Farmers Market and one for the Grocery Store.
Each Saturday morning, we get up early and head to the Farmers market with our list. We buy everything we can there, then get everything else we need a the Grocery Store. In the Summer, we were able to buy nearly 100% of our grocery list at the Farmers market, whereas we’re doing about ½ and ½ this Winter.

For me, having a meal plan makes it easy for me to come home and get dinner on the table quickly, without worrying about what ingredients I’ll need. And for Dan, it saves him all those back and forth trips to the grocery store. We do sometimes plan to hit a fishmonger or the grocery store mid-week to get something that won’t stay fresh, like scallops or bean sprouts, but that's not very often - so we can come home and enjoy time with one another. We find we’re eating better foods, as well as more healthy serving sizes, and we’re spending less by planning for all our meals. As going to the Farmers Market became a weekly trip, it’s become even easier to plan meals with specific seasonal ingredients in mind that we saw the previous week. (And when we stopped during the holidays, we noticed we didn't eat as well).

A few other things that have helped our success:

We leave one night a week open (usually) to eat out, or do something more spontaneous, so we don’t feel trapped in a schedule. We also sometimes move the order around mid-week when we discover that the meat didn’t thaw fast enough, or we didn’t actually have enough flour in the pantry.
We make extra food almost every night, and pack up lunch portions in Lock & Lock brand storage containers (which we can throw in our backpacks without fear of them opening). Some we freeze, some we just put in the fridge and take the next day. This eliminated the huge expense of eating lunch out every day.
We make muffins every weekend to eat for breakfast during the week, each week using a different seasonal berry or fruit from the market. It’s been fun for me to make that same recipe again and again, trying out new ingredients like flax powder to replace eggs, honey to replace sugar, and applesauce to replace butter – with the goal of creating a healthier, but equally satisfying breakfast. We also sometimes make a sweet bread, for additional variety. And we often make eggs on Sunday mornings.
We try to change which cookbooks we use, to keep variety in our meal plans. I’m a huge cookbook collector, so we have a lot of recipes to choose from. Some week’s we’ll decide we want to something Mexican and something Thai, and we grab cookbooks of those cuisines as a reference during meal planning.
We try to balance proteins through the week, so we do a pork dish, a chicken dish, a beef dish, a fish dish, and a vegetarian dish, for example.
We keep a list of recipes we’ve tried, including favorite recipes and favorite cookbooks, to use on weeks when we’re at a loss. This blogging every day method is perhaps extreme, but it’s worked really great for us, and has been a resource for friends and family looking for recipes (or curious about what we’re doing). I tag any entry that includes a recipe with the label 'recipe', so I can find them quickly. And recipes that are 'quick', I tag with that label for when we need a dinner idea for a night where we won't have a lot of prep time.