Menu Planning

I plan my menus a month at a time. I plan for 6 days in a week. I do this, as I have mentioned before, because the grocery stores in our city offer 10% off the entire grocery bill the first Tuesday of every month. That means Sunday and Monday are spent frantically meal planning and (since I decided to save money by eliminating waste) taking inventory of the pantry and freezer.

This month I decided I wanted the following per week:
1 Roast or crock pot dish for Sunday evening supper.
1 meal with ground beef.
1 meal with pork
1 meal with fish
the rest I would fill in with Chicken and whatever.

As I mentioned, I love Leanne Ely's cookbooks. So, I sit down with her books and a blank calendar and start scribbling. If you enlarge the monthly chart below, you'll notice I've written in the page numbers of the recipe I'm using (or otherwise indicate how to find it.) (This month, since I knew I would share it with you, I re-did it on the computer. Inspired by zooza, I applied coloured highlighters to indicate the meat. (Orange is chicken; pink, fish; green, ground beef, and yellow, pork, though I don't think any but the yellow showed up from the scan.)



My challenge--in addition to all this work (and believe me, it is work)--is the weekly grocery shop. This is supposed to be for the fresh ingredients we need: you know, the carrots, celery, spinach, milk, yogurt and eggs. This morning, because CT is fresh in my mind, I actually sat down with the menu, the cookbooks and a piece of paper and made a grocery list. Then I went shopping. I was so proud.

Oh--and just a note. These are not set in stone. For example, on Thursday we went to the mall and had supper there. (The first time this year, I think. There was a Grand Opening. They had a circus act. It was extraordinary.) So, on Friday, since I was somehow in the midst of cleaning the oven--making it unavailable for the planned fish, I made one of our favourite dishes, the Pork Diane we would have had on Thursday.

So. That's my menu planning process.

Here is what I've planned for supper this coming week:

Monday
Shrimp and Snow Peas on brown rice.

Tuesday (my daughter's ninth birthday--the menu was requested.)
Roast Chicken
White potato, carrots, and sweet potato. (Could be a yam. I don't know. The orange one.)
Yorkshire Pudding
Beets.
Chocolate cake and ice cream.

Wednesday
Crock Chops with potatoes and coleslaw.

Thursday
Greek Turkey Burgers with side "greek" salad.

Friday
Citrus Fish, brown rice, orange & kidney bean salad.

Saturday
leftovers.

Sunday
Roast Ham, veggies.

I am, when all is said and done, a fairly simple cook.