The whole idea bloomed from a realization that Jarrod and I have been eating many of the same meals the past 3 months. I already felt like I had a pretty good system down for meal-planning. But I improved on it this week and my hope is that it will remind me to try new recipes more often.
My meal planning system is as follows: I have a small notepad with recipes we commonly make and meal ideas written in it. They are as simple and generic as "grilled chicken" to more specific recipes like "Whole Wheat Spaghetti Carbonara." I pull out my little notebook when I'm building my list to go shopping, or placing my online grocery order. I buy ingredients to make certain recipes or meals, trying to plan out at least a week's worth of food. Once I purchase the groceries (and know they weren't out of an item) I then write the meal on a sticky note that goes on the fridge. Then I can look at my sticky notes and easily know what I have on hand to cook. If I skip this step, I feel lost. It's so easy to walk into the pantry and stare for ten minutes going "What in the world can I even make? I don't know what to make." Even though I keep a lot of food on hand, not all of it matches up all the time to make a full recipe.
So that was how I have been doing things for a while now: consult notebook with recipes, create shopping list, write out sticky notes. And it seemed to be fine, until my realization.
I decided to edit and update the first step, the recipe notebook.
When I get a new cookbook I like to go through all the pages and mark different recipes I'd like to try. I put it back on the shelf... and rarely pull it back out.
So I decided to ditch the notebook and move everything to a spreadsheet—a Google sheet, to be specific, so it's accessible anywhere and Jarrod can see it too. I added all of the things that were already in my notebook, and then came the new part: adding in any and every recipe I have ever marked to try. I added the name of it and where I could find it (ie, Betty Crocker cook book, page 254.)
While I was at it, I also organized my recipe binder a bit better. When I got married, my mom gave me a binder with a few recipe printouts from her to get me started, and I've added to it through the years. There were tons of magazine clippings and printouts I shoved in the back file pocket, never to be looked at again. I went through them all (and got rid of most of them, since my cooking style has changed so much from when we first got married) and typed out the ones I still wanted, and put those in the binder in their appropriate section.
I'm really glad I took the time to do this. All told, it probably took a few hours—spread across three days—going through everything and typing it out; I didn't want a partial list and need to do this twice.
But now I have my spreadsheet full of many recipes I've never made, and I am pretty confident that seeing those will keep them more 'top of mind' and I'll actually make more things.
Here's to better cooking in 2018!
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