Meal Planning: Rantings of a crazy lady

Two weeks since I've posted here? Gah. Sorry. I am nesting and tackling projects ... not only "projects", but "PROJECTS". You know those things you thought you might get to someday, but they aren't really pressing or necessary and could totally be ignored? Yes, those are the things that occupy my mind these days (amongst others).

I have finished the little girl's room and the big girl's room - at least 98% finished - and I'll put pictures up soon when they are clean enough to photograph. That was a huge relief to get all that done.

Otherwise, I've got about 7 lists of Things To Do in my iPhone "Notes" section that I just add to / rotate / delete from constantly. I have actually started packing my hospital bag at just shy of 32 weeks. Yes, this qualifies as excessive OCD, but in my defense, there was no bag packed last time and it left me frazzled and Erik scrambling. Of course we did just fine, but I'm trying to avoid all things frazzled.

My latest accomplishment was digitally filing about 8-10 years of recipes that I had saved. I am really trying to eliminate clutter / eliminate tasks hanging over my head / go paperless as much as possible. This hit all three goals - hooray! Erik looked at me sideways more than once but, to his credit, only once suggested that I put everything in the recycle bin and forget about it.

In "days before kid(s)" I subscribed to many cooking magazines and loved reading them. I would tear out recipes that sounded good and then file them in file folders - lots of file folders, lots of recipes. After I made something and thought it was worth making again, it would go in a different file box so I could be sure to find it again.

Fast forward to fewer cooking magazines and more mouths to feed and I'm really approaching our meal planning in a whole different way. I think I've got a good system down and I hope I can keep it working, reasonably well, after baby sister arrives. It is not an exaggeration to say that Evernote has completely changed the way I approach cooking, shopping and planning our meals. I'll share my approach to complete the life cycle of my recipe insanity.

I still get Martha Stewart Living (for life!), Cooking Light and Bon Appetit, plus the random recipes in other magazines or newsletters or blogs or whatever. Any recipe that looks promising gets "clipped" into Evernote. You can also type in recipes, or could even scan recipes, and then every document is searchable by word. This is key. If I have basil I need to use, or pork spare ribs, or whatever - I can search by that ingredient and every recipe will come up that includes it. When I first clip a recipe they get divided by folder - Looks Good, or Tried and True. You can also edit your recipes and add notes after you've made them. This way if I search my 1500+ recipes (see - it's a sickness), I will remember if it's something I've made before. If it isn't worth making again, you can delete it.

I do our grocery shopping for the week on Sundays. With rare exception, we don't visit the store more than once a week. I sit down with our calendar and plan meals for Sun - Thurs nights, accounting for evening meetings and such. I often put leftovers on the schedule so I'm not cooking every night, and I don't plan anything for the weekend to account for leftovers / eating out / whatever. I will usually plan something for lunch, too, and rarely breakfast (usually muesli).

Evernote has really helped me with picking what to put on the grocery list. I search our pantry / fridge / freezer to see what we need to use up and then can search for those ingredients to find a good recipe. We were getting our Door to Door Organics box every week, which I used in a similar way - searching by fruit or vegetable for recipes, but I've temporarily suspended our box to see if I can save some money in our food budget. I really liked the service and was generally 90% happy with the produce, but a box of food showing up every week that needs to be cooked with a newborn in the house probably isn't going to fly. So, now I use our local grocery store ad in a similar way if I'm looking for ideas - see what's on sale and build my grocery list from there.

Most weeks we hit the sweet spot of having most dinners cooked at home, brown bagging most lunches, and ending up with an empty refrigerator on Sunday so we can start all over. I really hate wasting food and I find that we rarely do (also because Erik will eat any leftovers, hallelujah). If I'm being really smart I'll even build in a meal to our week that is more or less a "pantry" meal - something that is made with mostly non-perishable ingredients and can be skipped if something else more exciting shows up during the week. The Dinner: A Love Story cookbook has some great ideas for these kinds of meals.

The process of filing and purging recipes was also interesting to see how my cooking has changed over the years - I'm much more confidant in the kitchen than I used to be, we eat many more vegetarian meals, and they mostly need to be quick to prepare. I had files and files of dessert / sweets recipes, but I rarely bake and likely won't be starting anytime soon.

Also, I'll let you in on a little secret ... it's not only recipes that I horde, but tear pages from magazines for "inspiration". I can fully blame my mother for this - she does it too, but probably not to my extreme. Decorating things, kid things, gift things - all sorts of stuff. I'm slowly trying to transition a lot of this to Pinterest, but that is a story for another time ...