This is part of our series on The Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 37th idea in the manifesto is:

Create a simple weekly dinner menu. If figuring out what’s for dinner is a nightly stressor for you or your family, consider creating a weekly menu. Decide on a week’s worth of simple dinners, set a specific dinner for each night of the week, go grocery shopping for the ingredients. Now you know what’s for dinner each night, and you have all the ingredients necessary. No need for difficult recipes — find ones that can be done in 10-15 minutes (or less).

Fried egg on a pizza? | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

As I wrote a while back, I’ve taken over the evening cooking duties in our home. Partially, to help My Life, partially, to help us save money and partially because I enjoy cooking.

I don’t however enjoy planning meals so much.

I was trying for a while to come up with a simple menu plan to make cooking and shopping easier and thanks to some suggestions I found from SimpleBites — I think I’ve settled on a solution that works best for me.

• Step 1 – Pick 5-7 categories of meals your family eats. I’ve chosen chicken, vegetarian, beef, pasta and favorites (those meals we keep coming back to).
• Step 2 – Start a list (I use a spreadsheet) of all the dishes you like to cook in each of those categories. Use note cards, columns, or separate sheets of paper for each category and list at least 5 or 6 dishes in each category for a good starting point. If you the recipes come from a website or cookbook it’s good to note that alongside the dish’s name.
• Step 3 – Start adding the dishes to your calendar. I started with the first day of the week (Monday for me), picked a recipe from the chicken category and added it as Monday’s meal. Tuesday I pick a meal from the vegetarian category. Wednesday, the beef category; Thursday, pasta; Friday, favorites.

  A full week, quickly and easily planned.

  Now I could start over on the following Monday with another chicken dish but to keep variety (and to avoid “Chicken Monday” or “Pasta Thursday”), I decided to skip the chicken category and start the second week off with a dish from the next category — vegetarian. Next I add a beef dish for Tuesday, pasta dish for Wednesday, a favorite dish on Thursday and on Friday I start the cycle over again with a chicken.

  Guess what we’ll have on the 3rd Monday of the month? A vegetarian dish! You’re getting the hang of it.

  From there it’s just following the cycle for the rest of the month.

• Step 4 – Plan your shopping. You should now have your entire month’s menu planned out you can shop wisely for the things you know you’ll need. You don’t have to buy everything at the start of the month, but we typically know we’ll need 4-5 lbs of ground turkey (we substitute ground turkey for ground beef), several lbs of chicken, along with various vegetables and such. If we plan wisely we can easily buy in bulk at our local warehouse store and know we’ll put all the food to good use.
• Step 5 – Prepare a month of food and then re-evaluate. Once you’ve gone through your full menu, see what works, what didn’t work. What you want to keep on next month’s menu and what you want to toss out the window. Once you get that figured out — repeat the cycle and enjoy.

So that’s my plan and my categories.

What categories would you use for your menu?

BTW – for more information on the picture above — fried egg on a pizza? Visit my post at Stranger in a Strange Land.

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keep reading...

• Weekly menu (1.17.10)
• Weekly menu (1.10.10)
• Weekly Menu (1.3.10)