I was thinking about how I menu plan and find inspiration for meals this morning and solidified some of my ideas. We all go through ruts in planning meals, so I thought by breaking my method down into concise steps, it might help someone else.
There seem to be 2 basic approaches to planning regular meals. One approach involves thinking of the meals you'd like to prepare and finding appropriate recipes, then making a shopping list to purchase the foods that required. This sort of menu planning approach is most often done on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The other approach flips these processes, so that the individual responsible for planning meals first stocks the food storage, then plans from what is abundant at home. To do this economically, one stocks up on basic ingredients when found on sale, making sure to have an adequate supply of the majority of ingredients that would go into the family's favorite meals.
Both approaches might use weekly circulars, either for inspiration or making up the shopping list. Both approaches can be money-savers. Both approaches can result in tasty meals that satisfy the family. And both approaches are lightyears better than the haphazard approach of "gee, what would we like to eat this week? I'll just figure that out when I'm at the store."
I'm attracted to both approaches for their different merits. Menu planning a week or more in advance satisfies my desire to control future events and feel more organized. Stocking the kitchen before planning appeals to my creative side -- the side that loves a challenge, loves taking 5 seemingly unrelated ingredients and making a tasty meal from them.
I tend to favor the second approach -- stocking the kitchen the planning meals a day or two in advance.
The second approach has a longer tradition in food preparation. In early human development, there wasn't the option to plan ahead what you might want to eat and then go out and acquire those foods. Your meals revolved around what you were lucky enough to obtain. In agrarian times, those obtainable foods were seasonal, tied to harvest and animal slaughter and preservation seasons. Whatever kept the longest was what you had to work with in late winter through spring.
1) Surpluses to inspire a meal plan
While I don't have to rely on ancient food preservation techniques, I do tend to think of what I have in surplus. By surplus, I mean fitting one of two descriptions. Surplus could mean I simply have a lot of the one ingredient, and by a lot I mean more than enough to last several weeks. Surplus can also mean that whatever amount I have currently will not keep very long and so is surplus in the sense that I have so much of the ingredient in a fragile state that it will spoil unless it is used in every or near every meal in the immediate future. It is surplus relative to its lifespan. I may not know what ingredients are surplus more than a few days out at a time. With a garden, a surplus can
surprise me overnight. In addition, a great sale on peanut butter can also
surprise me without warning. My primary shopping motivation is to buy as much as possible at the lowest possible price. As a result, I typically stock up wildly when I see a stellar deal.
So, step one in my meal planning is to survey my ingredients for surpluses.
2) Thinking of food groups
Step two involves identifying some basic food groups amongst the surpluses. When planning a dinner, I try to incorporate 1 protein source (or a combination of protein sources that will equal a serving of protein), 1 grain or starchy vegetable, and 2 fruit and/or vegetable servings. I don't adhere to this rigidly. If we have a quiche that has a grain-based crust plus rice, that's fine. We could also have an entree-sized salad that was heavier on the produce and lighter on grains or starches. And once in a while we have a "fun" meal of hot dogs or burgers and fried potatoes or chips, no fruits or vegetables. In the overall scheme of our diet, these meals are okay, as we generally eat pretty healthy. But anyway, this is the second step, finding the ingredients that will fill the protein, grain/starch, and produce requirements amongst the surpluses in my stock.
3) Using ethnic/period cuisine to help put the ingredients all together
The third step is where some thinking comes in -- how to put these assorted ingredients together in a pleasing way. Since our family enjoys foods from a variety of cuisines, I tend to think ethnic when it comes to planning dinner. We enjoy Italian, Mexican, Greek, Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian, and perhaps not ethnic but period, early American. In my mind, I'll run through the different possibilities with my identified surplus ingredients, and think of some of my family's favorite ways to eat those foods. Sometimes the ingredients lend themselves to particular ethnic cuisines, such as snow peas and Asian dishes or avocado and Tex-Mex meals. Other times, the ingredients are a little more ambiguous. Pureed pumpkin could be made into something period or regional American, like pie or a sweet souffle. Or, pumpkin can be the basis of a Mexican or Latin soup, with the addition of cumin, peppers and corn. I also like pumpkin as the base for an Italian pasta sauce, adding garlic, sage, and Italian sausage. If I was in the mood for an Asian meal, I could also use pumpkin cut into thin slices and added to a stir-fry. Often times, making a particular ingredient work for a specific cuisine is just a matter of using the seasonings that I find in other foods of that cuisine. I know from experience that chili powder and cumin work well in Mexican meals. So, if I take whatever surplus food that I have and treat it with with those seasonings, there's a good chance I'll have something that resembles foods from that ethnicity. Same thing with Asian meals. If I add garlic, soy sauce, ginger, and maybe a pinch of sugar, my meal will taste somewhat Asian. These meals won't be "authentic," but we're just talking about family suppers where
authenticity doesn't matter nearly as much as
tasty.
Here's an example from my life: we currently have a surplus of eggs (bought 15 dozen in a case a week ago), rice (bought in a 25-lb bag a couple of months ago), tomato paste (was frozen once already and has been thawed and in the fridge for over a week, so needs using ASAP), kale in the garden, and foraged blackberries. When one item seems unrelated to the others significantly enough than flavors would just no go, I separate out that one item and serve it on its own. In this case, it's the blackberries. I don't think the blackberries would go well in a main-dish prepared with the rest of the ingredients. So, I could serve the blackberries as dessert, like topped with honey or sweetened yogurt. That leaves me with eggs, rice, tomato paste, and kale. My family enjoys even-baked frittatas and they are easy for me to make. (I saute whatever veggies I have and put into a buttered pie plate along with beaten, salted eggs and milk, then bake in a low oven for half an hour. Cut in wedges and serve.) So a kale and onion frittata that is seasoned with salt and garlic will fill both a protein and vegetable need. Since I have tomato paste needing to be used, I'll make a quick tomato sauce with water, garlic, salt, and oregano to spoon over the top of the frittata in the last 10 minutes of baking -- bonus on the veggies with this meal. I have lots of rice. I also have 2 new loaves of French bread. I consider the rice more of a surplus ingredient because I have more rice than we can consume in the next several weeks. Whereas with the bread, it would take me additional labor to add to our bread supply when we run out in a few days. Even though we have a lot of the ingredients to make more bread, I factor in the labor that is required. So, although we enjoy bread more than rice, I tend to include a lot of rice in our meals because it is easy on my labor. This is my meal plan for tonight. I really love Italian cuisine, so my inspiration for using my ingredients comes from Italy. I serve something similar to this almost every week. It's an easy meal for me to think of and takes relatively little hands-on time to prepare.
Here's another example from my life: we also have a surplus of beans and lentils, barley, carrots, garden kale, blackberries, plus the above-mentioned tomato paste. There was leftover cooked barley and lentils in the fridge from a previous night, both of which needed using soon. It was my husband's night to cook and his cooking skills and ambition are more limited than mine, so he chose to make a soup as the entree. He combined cooked lentils and barley with tomato paste, water, chopped carrots, onions, garlic, and Italian herbs/spices (oregano, basil, red pepper flakes), and salt and made a very respectable soup. He served this with fresh blackberries sprinkled with sugar and leftover pita bread. I'd say this was a Mediterranean-inspired meal with a PNW dessert.
Here's one last example from my real life: Asian-style ham and egg fried rice, using surplus cabbage, garden snow peas, garden garlic, leftover brown rice, and ham from Easter, plus blackberry pie. The day that we had this meal, I had a surplus of previously-frozen eggs (now thawed and on their last day or two), leftover brown rice, an aging head of cabbage, and a whole bunch of snow peas in the garden, plus the usual bucket of blackberries. When I have eggs that need using plus leftover rice, I usually think of fried rice. It's an easy one-dish meal to prepare -- throw everything into a skillet and just like that, you have dinner. When I'm experiencing a drought of ideas for dinners, fried rice is one of the first meals I think of. On this day, since I knew that throwing together the main dish would be easy, I was able to focus my kitchen time on baking a pie. I satisfied everyone.
While I've identified two different approaches to meal planning, these two don't need to be exclusive. A lot of people use a hybrid approach. They keep most of the basics in stock at all times, but use flyers and cookbooks to plan a week's or month's worth of meals before making a shopping list. They will look at their current stock in addition to what they find on sale or determine what they need for particular dishes. I do this occasionally, too. I may have a particular recipe that I want to make or we may have a celebratory meal in our week, so I'll think of the foods I want to make, then add the ingredients that I am lacking to my grocery list. The hybrid approach can provide increased variety to the week or
specialness to a single meal. We are blessed to live in a time that a hybrid approach is possible. We have salaries that allow for the purchase of ingredients (instead of relying solely on what you can produce for yourself), we have retail outlets that stock a variety of foods year round, and we have a constant flow of information that exposes us to lots of new ideas for meals. When you pair these with the relatively new concept, the warehouse store, large quantities of any ingredient can be had at a discount, leading to many people unintentionally or intentionally stocking up on the basics and giving them some surpluses in their kitchen stock. This is a blessed time and place for meal options.
Anyways, these thoughts were jumbled in my mind and I thought I'd share them, like I said, in case my thoughts can help someone else, or in case my thoughts could spur more discussion on the topic. Speaking of food and meals, I need to eat some lunch! Have a good rest of your day!
