Conference turris::cooks

    The Joy of Cooking has a section on menus...and the recipes for
    what they recommend!
    
    Daniel

    My problem is cooking the same things over and over.  I have a friend
    that writes down her weekly dinner menu and keeps in on the fridge.
    She is home all day and can make lots of different things.  I don't
    get home until 6pm and I can't cook for two hours after that.  My
    husband and I had a fight over meal planning.  We came to a solution.
    (his idea)
    
    Before we get up from the dinner table, WE decide what we'll be
    having for supper the following night.  We've been doing it for
    a week now, but it is really working out wonderfully.  I don't mind
    cooking, but I hate trying to decide what to have every single night.
    
    I don't have the Joy of Cooking (or the other one "Joy of" book
    either).
    
    My name -- Joy.

    
    There's a book by Marian Burros a food writer/activist (honest!)
    called `You've Got It Made' that provides menus that are balanced,
    nutritious, low fat, but good.  Her thing is low/cost, low quantity
    of meat in a menu, so they're not elaborate either.
    
    Julie

Marian Burros is also the author of "Keep it Simple" which contains a varity of
30 minute meals (entire menus).  She has a nice variety of tasty dishes, most
are for 2 to 4 persons, and all are planned with nutrition in mind.  The
book is available in paperback -- a small investment for the start of many
a great (and easy) meal!

Sandy

    re: .2 
    
    I plan meals (suppers) and baking by the week before I write the 
    weekly grocery list.  On an ordinary calendar, I write down a supper 
    menu for each day, along with the cookbook initials and page number
    (I have 40+ cookbooks and I can't always remember which one I need).
    Then, I make sure I have all the ingredients on hand before shopping
    and I cross off each menu as it is used (we don't always stick to
    the menu for a particular day).  I don't get home until 6 pm or
    later either so at least I have saved the decision-making time
    (as much as an hour as I dawdle over the cookbooks and snack).
    My husband can also start dinner if he gets home first (a rarity)
    because he can just check the calendar.  The disadvantage is my
    menu-planning is usually a 1-2 hour process once a week (usually
    right before I want to go shopping)  because I love 
    looking at my cookbooks and cross referencing recipes.  Also, this
    doesn't eliminate actual cooking time, although I try to plan for
    quick meals during the week.        
    
    Tammy

    re .5: Me, too.  I'm not crazy about grocery shopping anyways
    (especially if the store is out of some common item that I really need
    so I have to go to *another* store to finish - what a waste of time!),
    and don't have a lot of spare time these days, so I always make out the
    menus for the week, and the grocery list for them - I don't go to the
    grocery store without a list.  I actually put a bookmark in the
    relevant cookbook for each menu, and put the cookbooks on top of the
    microwave (just the right size spot), and then put them away after that
    menu is used.  I write the week's menu down one side of the grocery
    list as I do the list, including notes like when to thaw various items
    that are needed for later menus.  It usually takes an hour or two to do
    the week's menu (unless there is a dinner party or something), and I
    usually do that on Tuesday since I usually shop on Wednesday.  I don't
    usually plan on doing very fancy things with vegetables (unless I am
    planning a party), so I write down generic things like "Friday
    vegetable" (meaning one that can cook quickly so we can eat before
    going to the synagogue - artichokes are out on Fridays!) and then can
    substitute whatever looks good at the store (like, if fiddlehead ferns
    are in season and not outrageous, I always buy those instead of
    whatever was on the menu) - this tends to mean that really perishable
    veggies get eaten on Thursday and Friday, and by the following Tuesday
    we are eating less perishable stuff (like carrots).  But it sure saves
    time!
    
    One of my friends thinks this limits spontaneity, though!  She says she
    shops nearly every day, on her way home from DEC, and wanders around
    the store until she finds something that looks appealing for dinner for
    her family, plus any other needed items she remembers.  I would feel
    like I was wasting an awful lot of time doing things that way, but then
    again I'm not fond of shopping of any kind anyhow, and can think of
    lots of places I'd rather wander around in than the grocery store.

    Re .6
    
    Now, I can't think of something I enjoy more than stopping at Idylwilde
    Farm on my way home from work to pick up something exciting for
    dinner.  I don't menu plan, so it doesn't matter what I pick up
    since I can just go home and cook whatever I bought.  
    
    I really wish I had the discipline to menu plan.  We always end
    up wasting so much food in our house.  Just this morning I had to
    throw out a pound of Danish Ham, since nobody bothered to eat it
    over the past couple weeks.  I just walk through the grocery store
    once a week and buy whatever looks good, with no idea when we will
    get around to eating it.
    
    	-Nancy

We do the same as the last few respondants -- make up a menu, shop against it,
and then I tick meals off as they are done.  It's great because I can just
breeze in the door, pick something off the menu and start dinner without
having to get into "what do you want?/I dunno, what do YOU want?/ I dunno..."
with my wife.

We keep things from getting too planned out by always having at least one
"Free Throw" night (where we're each responsible for getting our own
dinner) and putting "go out to dinner" or "order pizza" on the menu too
from time to time.  

("Go out to dinner" usually specifies where, or we play the alternate
game "Where Do You Want To Go?" until midnight.)

				>>>==>PStJTT

    I don't exactly do menu planning, but I do keep in mind that I usually
    cook 4 out of 7 nights a week. So when I grocery shop I think in
    4's.  I too hate to find that the market is out of something that
    I really need, because out where I live there is only one market.
    
    I do keep my freezer pretty well stocked though, and with the microwave
    it doesn't take much to make a last minute change. The only time
    that I stop after work every night is during sweet corn season,
    but there is no browsing just grab the corn and run. 

    Woman's Day or Family Cirle Magazine includes a monthly menu plan 
    in the form of a calendar.  They include entres, side dish, vegetable
    and/or salad, and I think they even include desert.  Recipes are
    provided.
    
    You may not use the plan every night of the month, but they give
    you 30+ ideas for the nights you will cook.
    
    Chris  

    I keep looking for new, better meal-planning aids - none of which I
    use, but that's beside the point; _someday_, my meal-planner will  come
    - so when I spotted a new menu-planning cookbook on the last-chance
    island at Barnes & Noble (the one they put where you have to look at it
    while waiting to pay for your purchases, sort of the bookseller's
    equivalent of candy in the checkout line), I seized it.
    
    It turns out I was snookered (again), but only partially; the book has
    some good ideas, it's just the execution that needs work. This thing
    consists of a hard-cover folder that opens flat into three sections,
    each of which has a spiral-bound collection of recipe cards in it. The
    first one is "Appetizers" (including salads, not just canap�s), the
    second "Main Courses" (including things that might pass as side dishes,
    like potatoes), and the third "Desserts" (desserts). The cards are
    bound at the top so that you can flip each book to a likely-looking
    recipe and then scan all three side by side to see the complete menu.
    [If you happen to want more than one recipe from a single book, you're
    out of luck; you'll have to flip pages, just like with ordinary
    cookbooks.]
    
    Each recipe covers two cards; the top is a photograph ("is it
    _supposed_ to look like that?") and the bottom contains instructions
    (the ones I read seemed to be pretty clearly documented) and a few
    handy hints for presentation. 
    
    So - the layout impressed me as a convenient way to package assorted
    recipes for different courses, and to allow all the recipes for a
    single meal to be visible at once. However, since the setup is limited
    to three books/courses, and since cards can't easily be added to the
    spiral-bound sets, it's got a lot of builtin restrictions. (The
    selection of recipes tends towards the "fancy," as well, and there were
    only about 20% of them that I'd actually use. This is a decent average
    for a cookbook - one never likes *all* the recipes - but for a
    meal-planner it's not too great.)
    
    It did occur to me that this setup could be made more flexible if one
    could obtain a number of smallish binders (one for each course - make
    up your own indexing scheme) that would open flat and could be lined up
    side by side or top to bottom, preferably with plastic sleeves or those
    self-stick photo-insert things, and construct one's own set. [This
    whole process would be best done via computer, since it's easier to
    index the same recipe under multiple headings, but until it's time- and
    cost-effective to hand-enter or scan all those clippings and recipe
    cards into the machine - and to have the machine's recipes handy while
    you're cooking - a hard copy system seems like a good idea.]
    
    -b