Sweet Southern Pursuits: Menu Planning

Me: "I'm hungry. What do you want for dinner?"
Derek: "I don't care. What do you want?"
Me: "I don't care. We don't have anything laid out."
Derek: "Okay."
Me: "Okay." (15 minutes later) "So...dinner?"

If you're anything like me, this is a typical conversation in your house. It's annoying, really. And this exact conversation is why we end up with pizza, McDonald's, or Arby's two or three days a week. (Franklin, 1; Petersburg, 0. There's no fast food in Franklin, so this whole eat-really-poorly-all-the-time isn't even a possibility. You eat well or nothing at all.)

I've tried to combat this issue by forming a menu every month, and it works! (As long as you follow it.) It allows us to know what we're having every day, so we can go to the store and pick up anything we need or lay out meat from the freezer the evening before so that the conversation above doesn't happen.

January's Meals. You can see that I switched certain days around as needed. The green stars are first time favorites to try again.

At the beginning of every month, I sit down, break out my cookbooks and magazines I subscribe to, and hash out a meal for every evening of the month. I generally allow 1-2 days per week for leftovers and get any requests from Derek. I record the meals in a regular wall calendar and hang it up in the kitchen near the refrigerator.


The cookbooks/magazines used for this month. The blue notebook is my grandmother's recipe book.

I begin with an empty calendar. You can use any type of calendar--wall calendar, dry-erase calendar, chalkboard calendar. It really doesn't matter. I have an elephant calendar from my Christmas stocking. (I love elephants! That's for another day though.)

I first go through and mark off any days that I know we won't be cooking at home, or I know that we're cooking something special. For example, every other week on Thursday we eat at my in-laws' house, so I mark that on the calendar. If we're having something special for a birthday celebration, or if I'm getting together with friends for dinner, I mark that on the calendar. In June, you'll see that there's a whole week when Derek was on his own because I was out of town. I mark that in the beginning too. This makes it much easier when I'm actually putting meals on certain days.

I just use a regular wall calendar.

Next I begin searching through my cookbooks, online cookbooks, and magazines for recipes. I'm always wanting to try new recipes, so this is the perfect time to look for them. Once I find a recipe I want to use, I mark it on the calendar. It doesn't really matter what day you record it; just whatever/whenever feels right to you. If it's a new recipe, I make sure to include its location on the calendar so that I can find it later. For example, on the calendar below I listed Simple Stromboli on February 5th. It was a new recipe, so I included its location. "BHG 15th" means the Better Homes & Gardens, 15th edition cookbook. It's found on page 246. This makes it really easy to locate later. Similarly, "TOH" means Taste of Home, and "pinned" means it's on my Pinterest account.

Once the calendar is full, I create a grocery list. This list is sometimes for one week at a time, and other times it's for two weeks. It just depends on if we will have the opportunity to go to the grocery store. This list is entirely based upon what we're going to be eating. If it's not on the menu, we generally won't buy it. For example, if we get to the store and I see that shrimp is on sale, I still don't buy it if it's not on the list. This has helped to reduce how much we're spending on groceries and use the boxes and cans that are in the pantry that always seems to get pushed back and never used.