Micro Managing My Menu

[Demimonde]

I was curious whether any of you guys have any tips or strategies for menu planning. I want to be better about doing this, to improve our diet as well as what we enjoy, but I am having a hard time with it.

As a single lady I did to an extent. But typically my mode was to shop in order to make make a couple of big recipes that I would reheat over the week for time and convenience sake. And snacking stuff. I did a lot of grazing on raw ingredients back then since I was often too lazy to cook.

Since C and I have been together, we have had budgetary concerns as our main priority. Lots of rice and beans. I would shop the sales and clip coupons in order to stock up on stuff. What I made was mostly dictated by what I had scored at the market, and from there I just made it yummy with whatever other random things I had on hand. Great for creativity and improv-ing. Bad for our health as our diet was not much varied with a dependance on some cheap processed foods as fillers. ( ) Also, to make that stuff tasty I would often rely on fatty stuff to make it tastier, cheese and butter and dairy and what not. It is not good for either of us.

So, I want to undertake a new adventure in my kitchen practice. Not to be extravagant or anything. Just to plan out some healthier, tastier recipes and stick to it. I have looked around for tools, but haven't really found anything that works for me. I don't like the premade lists because many are geared to big families, or are either insanely frugal, or insanely extravagant, or are for people who eat grass, or for people with palates that wouldn't know if they are eating grass, or people who only want to spend five minutes in the kitchen a day. I want some more creativity and control than that.

I haven't found any online tools that let me enter my own recipes and make lists that are worthwhile. That is what I think I really need. Some way to database my recipes so I can pick and choose what I want for the week and make a shopping list. Even if it takes some time investment to put together, it would be worth it for me.

Does anyone here do anything like that? How do you manage your kitchen?

[LadyShea]

Relevant to my interests.

[livius drusus]

I've been using Living Cookbook the past year or so and I don't know how I got by without it. It comes with a bunch of recipes which I duly ignore, preferring instead to create my old folders and subfolders (folders and subfolders, Shea!!1). It takes time up front to copy all your recipes into the software, but there's an easy copypasta feature for online stuff, and Firefox even has an extension that autograbs recipes from like a thousand sites and imports them into Living Cookbook. The extension has a mutligrab that scoops up every recipe on a page, so I was able to import hundreds of favorites from my Cook's Illustrated and Epicurious accounts with three clicks.

Once everything's in, you can easily plan a menu by selecting your recipes then click a button to generate a shopping list. There's a calendar function so you can plan it all out over weeks and months. It also automatically calculates nutritional content -- calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, potassium carbs, protein -- for every recipe you input, even the ones you copied from gramma's yellowed slip of paper. It can be quite a revelation.

[seebs]

We're really bad, because on any given day, there is a non-zero chance that the answer will be "no one here can face the complexities of reheating canned food, let alone cooking".

A lot of what we do is pick Standard Meals that we can then make on command, and sort of plan those out a bit in advance when we can.

[lisarea]

One time, a long long time ago, my dad showed me some banking software he'd written to balance his accounts and stuff, and I was like, "Dad, there's software that already exists that does all that stuff," and he was like, "Yeah, well your face also exists so shut up" or something to that effect.

So for a while I have been planning that some day p. soon, I'd have to make some kind of system to manage my shopping lists and recipes and such, but I hadn't gotten around to it yet, and I was all like UGH I AM GOING TO HAVE TO DO THIS THING SOON, and it had seriously never even occurred to me that such an obvious thing already exists. What the hell?

So yeah, I just installed one lol.

(In his defense, I'm sure my dad knew that software existed already, but he just wanted to roll his own anyway. I DID NOT. I just sometimes do shit and then I have flashbacks to me making fun of people for doing that exact same shit that I am now doing.)

[lisarea]

OK, so I am only just starting to mess with this one, but so far it looks pretty cool. All I've done is imported a few things off the web so far, but it does seem to import them neatly and make shopping lists and conversions and stuff. Best part, though: Free, for Linux or Windows.

Gourmet Recipe Manager

[Demimonde]

See, I knew you guys would have some amazing tools to share.

[S.Vashti]

Oh, that stuff. I use YummySoup. It can create shopping lists from selected recipes (but I don't use it, I use an iPod app for lists). But it's good because at the beginning of the week, I can plan out my one or two fish, two chicken, one beef and one or two vegetarian dishes for dinner.

eta: not linking to YummySoup, it's for macs only.

[Qingdai]

You know some of us have Macs, is it free or do you have to pay for the application?

Or I could search for it myself, free for 15 days.