1mo ago

Starting at planning menus - Any advice?

I'm looking to have tasty and balanced food while maintaining a reasonable budget and being more organised.
I know how to cook. I already have tasty yet not complicated meals I'm use to make but I never needed to be organised about it before.

So I decided to start to write menu in advance, do a some meal prepping probably a bit of batch cooking.
I found resources online to start following a plan but maybe you have advices for the beginner that I am.

Thank you!

28 comments

Look at the grocery ad and pick one or two items on sale that you can use to cook a meal you'll enjoy.
Add all of the ingredients to your cart.
Write down all of the ingredients that won't be used entirely by your meal. For instance, maybe you need to buy milk but will only use 1C, or will buy an onion but only use half of it.
Create a different meal that includes those ingredients. Add any additional ingredients you'll need to your cart.
Repeat steps 3-4 until you have a week's worth of meals with zero waste.
Example: I want to make tacos, so I add:
Ground turkey.
Tortillas.
Cheddar cheese.
Romaine lettuce.
Red onion.
I'll have plenty of everything left over except the ground turkey. Maybe my 2nd meal will be a salad to use the romaine, red onion, and cheddar. But I would have to buy chicken breast and garlic bread.
So I'll have tortillas, chicken breast, and garlic bread left. Maybe I can make spaghetti w/ garlic bread and chicken caesar wraps.
Rinse and repeat.
- That is very ressourceful! I will definitly try that. Thank you!

For frugality you might try shopping based on what is discounted at the store, rather than based on a pre-made menu. Go with what you can buy for cheap and creatively put together meals from what you can source for free (e.g. work with your local food not bombs or dumpster diving folks) or for cheap (what is discounted with coupons, clearance items, defective food, etc.).
Menus can still be a good idea, for example having a set list of items to buy helps me avoid over-buying or buying foods I don't need.
- Yep. It's also good to figure out what your nonperishable staples are and stock up on those when they go on sale or buy in bulk if they price per pound is cheaper.
  If you're just getting into cooking, don't do this before you have a pretty good idea of what your staples are. Pay attention to the recipes you go back to over and over, find other recipes that use similar ingredients and try those too. My personal staples are canned tomatoes (whole peeled and crushed), olive oil, dried beans (chickpeas, black beans, kidney beans, white beans), and rice (basmati and short grain). I cook with all of these things a ton (and they're all pretty cheap, except for olive oil). If I see any of these things on sale I'll almost always grab some. I always have a pretty deep stock of all of them in my pantry. You must have a good system for organizing by expiration date. For stuff like rice and beans I like to store in Mason jars with oxygen absorbers to extend the shelf life.
  Having this stuff on hand in larger amounts can also save money as a hedge against inflation and supply chain issues. Can also keep you fed if you get laid off.
  Again, know what you'll use before you start with this approach. It doesn't save money to buy food on sale that you won't eat.
  
  Oh, I usually think stocking up is a bad idea - it leads to meals that are less nutritious and tasty, and it's easy to waste food that way.
  When I meant buy what is discounted I didn't mean buy more than you are going to use, I was talking more about not planning to make Thai curry and then paying extra $$ for bell peppers out of season, instead see what is discounted at the store - maybe turnips or rutabagas, and then make your meal plan based on that - e.g. pasties, baked winter vegetables, or a soup instead.
  The point I was trying to make is that pre-determining the ingredients you need to buy will end up costing you money rather than making the meals based on what is currently discounted and cheap.
  Regarding back-stock: you have good tips about extending the life of rice or beans, storing in mason jars also help reduce the likelihood of pests getting into the food. Oxygen absorbers are a good idea, too. However, if you are poor it can be a lot to buy mason jars - so saving glass like used pasta jars, or seeing if there are any free or cheap jars through Freecycle, Craigslist, etc. might be an option.
  Though I will say dry beans don't last as long as I originally thought, and whenever I stocked up on dry beans I found they were really hard to get soft when I eventually used them, even after cooking for more than 24 hours and soaking the night before. Old beans just stay hard. It's better to treat beans as something you buy fresh, something that lasts months rather than years.
  Similar issue with brown rice, or anything that isn't super refined (e.g. whole wheat flour) - you want to buy those in small amounts and use them quickly, they are more likely to spoil in a short period and lose nutritional value and flavor.
  Refined foods like white rice are easier to store for a long time, and I keep my all purpose flour in the freezer so I can have more on hand than just what I'm using - that works pretty well.
  You can also buy whole wheat berries, then make flour from scratch, but when you're poor it's hard to have time for all that.
  Canned foods are more expensive than buying dry stuff, though it is a way to always have some extra beans on hand that won't go bad as quickly as dry beans, so if you have the extra cash it's not a bad idea to buy some canned food, if you really will use it. Just don't buy a lot - one or two cans and rotate them as you use them.
  EDIT: to be honest, when I was poor I didn't have the energy to cook or optimize my grocery habits. Mostly I ate whatever food waste was in the kitchen I was working at, and some days that meant I mostly ate a bunch of white rice and nothing else. My diet was fucked up and it wasn't healthy, but it meant I rarely spent money on food. Being poor also meant I spent the money I would have spent on food mostly on beer so I could relax in the evening. I mostly cooked on weekends when I wasn't working, and I mostly bought whatever sounded good like steak, but from places like Walmart. Poverty unfortunately makes it hard to optimize your life, as you rarely have the time or energy, let alone the will power or mental health, to be efficient.
  Getting out of poverty ironically gave me more energy and leisure time to spend on cooking at home and so on. It also meant being able to escape living in ghetto apartments and moving into suburbs where I could grow food in a lawn, e.g. I didn't have to buy garlic for an entire year just based on what I grew in one season - that's something I could never do living in apartments.
  All this to say, if you're poor just survive and find a way out, don't beat yourself up for being inefficient if you just can't be.
  
  That's a good point. I know that the fly lady home managing method incluse making a list of what you need in your house. When doing you're shopping list, you go thought it to be sure to know what you might need. I should try to make that kind of list and to see the overlap with sales.

I keep an excel spreadsheet of recipes. Every sheet focuses on a single ingredient, either produce or protien. I see what's on sale each week and look for recipes that utilize those ingredients.
- Good idea. I think I will start some sort of journaling of my menu to help the planning. This should be included.

I buy a couple types of meat, usually chicken and ground beef, 2-3 starches, generally rice, pasta, and potatoes, plus salad ingredients and 2-3 locally-farmed fresh veggies. Then I rotate which ingredients I use each day, so we don't eat the same things two days in a row. I don't plan ahead how I'll cook ingredients or what seasonings I'll use, I just do what I feel like at the time.
- I guess I should look which the meals I like have ingredients in common to make rotation.

Try cooking Indian and East Asian foods. Very affordable and healthy. Many don’t even require meat. If you get rice get easy Asian rice not south Asian, ie long grain. Personal opinion, it tastes much better.
Super easy meal is Japanese curry and rice. Get the premade curry packs that you put into your vegetable and water mix.
Fried rice is a good easy one.
Fun new snack I’ve done recently is seasoned then baked chickpeas.
Always have an easy breakfast and sandwich supplies. I just tomato or cucumber sandwiches.
I think the best thing is just to eat similar meals each week but can switch things up.
- Always have an easy breakfast and sandwich supplies. I just tomato or cucumber sandwiches.
  This is something I really need to be careful about. Now that I don't cook for a very spontanious and flexible day, I need to have quality snack available. Or esle, I'll end up having good lunch and dinner but a bunch of unhealthy food all day long.
  
  Well those examples do include a decent amount of mayo… but you could go worse with a nice bread and vegetables.
  Have you found anything that works since you made the post?

It can help to have designated meal types for each day. E.g. taco Tuesdays, pasta Wednesdays, etc.
Doesn’t have to be the same meal each week but narrows down the choices making decisions and planning easier.
- I see. I was thinking, maybe I could plan two weeks of meals and rotate them. Then, I would need to change this plan 4 times a year to keep with seasonal ingredients. But I felt overwhelm by the idea of finding so many recipe. But actually, I could do whatever the season :
  Monday rice
  Tuesday tradional meal
  Wesnesday pasta
  Thursday exotic cuisine
  Friday potatoes
  It would be easy to narrow traditional recipe to seasonal ingredients now. Wow... It seems so easy now.

Sorted food does a free trial. They have a bunch of meal packs. 3 dishes scaled to however many people you're cooking for that share ingredients. The app even has a grocery list. You could go through, grab the recipes and grocery lists that look good, then cancel. I believe one of their goals is to save you enough money that it's worth paying them.
I'm a food nerd, and use it weekly. Mostly for the grocery list. Pick a pack that sounds good, grab the grocery list, and know that I have 3 meals worth of food. The recipes I've tried have been solid, but mostly I just look at the ingredients that are sitting there and make something. It forces me into verity, instead of just grabbing the same shit at the store every time.
- There is a lot of things I excluse from my diet so I'm never very attracted by this type of offer. Did you have a good experience related to allergies, veganism or alike? What would be the difference btw that and buying already cookies meal from restaurant I know and trust? Appart from the pleasure of cooking obviously ʘ‿ʘ
  
  They allow up to 5 allergies/dislikes. The difference is cost. By putting together 3 meals with one set of ingredients, it really helps cut the cost of food down.

I riff on basically the same thing all week.
1 meal is (at least mostly) a salad with whatever fresh is lying around + dressing + cheese
My other daily meal is brown rice (genmai), some kind of sauce (usually like sriracha), cheese, and whatever veg + protein is handy/cheap. I sometimes replace the rice with potato (baked but occasionally mashed) or corn tortillas. If your body is nice enough not to hate you, tons of wheat options there.
In the colder months, I might also throw in the odd batch of chili + cornbread (sub wheat flour for rice flour, but you probably don't need to do this) or some other soup/stew.
I think learning templates is much more important than recipes since you can just riff on them with whatever you have to hand that's within the budget. Recipes are good for the more fiddly things or treats.
Edit: I bulk buy and freeze chicken (sometimes whole but usually thighs), pork, seafood, fish, etc. and supplement with local seafood when seasonal and tofu. I also buy lots of frozen veggies in bulk which, in most places these days, are better in terms of flavor and nutrition than canned. I also grow what I can, but I realize that's not going to be possible for everyone at significant amounts (though growing some greens and herbs is probably doable by almost anyone; I've also grown chilis in PET soda bottles in windows).
Edit2: full disclosure: once a week we grab something take-out from the grocery, usually sushi since we love it and basically everything else runs afoul of my wheat issues.
- I think learning templates is much more important than recipes since you can just riff on them with whatever you have to hand that’s within the budget. Recipes are good for the more fiddly things or treats.
  That a good thing to keep in mind.

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