Grocery Shopping/Meal Planning

I do make weekly meal plans, and I have a process, although I’m not sure how helpful it will be to anyone else… Saturday is the big shopping day, so I sit down with my recipe binder on Friday night and start combing through it. (My binder is full of printouts I’ve culled over the years from friends and from various newsletters and websites.) Most of my ingredients get purchased Saturday at the WalMart SuperCenter. I also go to the grocery once during the week to pick up items that might go bad if purchased too far ahead, like veggies or deli cold cuts, and specialty ingredients that aren’t available at Wal-Mart.

I try to achieve my variety in form, so I usually end up with a salad night, a wrap or quesadilla night, a pizza, a pasta dish (which gets eaten 2 nights), and a meat-centered meal (which also gets eaten 2 nights). Note that the 2 night meals don’t get served 2 nights in a row — I put a 1 night meal like salad or pizza in between.

I have my recipe binder organized so that meat recipes are together, vegetarian recipes are together, and so on, which speeds up the process a bit. I tend to pick the meat meal first and then see if it needs ingredients (like a particular cheese or veg) that might not get fully used in that recipe, and then I keep those items in mind when I’m picking the other recipes for the week.

When I’m doing the process, I also pull potential recipes for the following week, although I don’t always use them right away.

It’s not a perfect system, since there’s a lot of flipping through the binder and scanning recipes, but I haven’t come up with a better system yet. :-)