Meal Planning

When we moved to Chicago over the summer, we were pleasantly surprised that our apartment has a ton of storage (and not so pleasantly surprised that it has no A/C!). So, we decided to start doing some of our shopping at Costco. We quickly found that we can only tolerate one Costco trip a month because it's always a zoo and tends to make us twitchy, so I've really had to step up my meal planning to make sure we get enough meats for the month (we get a lot of frozen, or put stuff in the freezer). It's been really tricky, but here's how I've tried to go about it, and I think by now I have a pretty good system down.

First, a few things you should know:
We do some weekly shopping at a regular grocery store for things we can't get at Costco, fresh produce, etc.
I usually cook 4 servings for the 2 of us, and we have leftovers on the second night. Usually the exact same thing, sometimes with a different starch or veg.
Sometimes I find a good recipe for a protein (for example, this week's Balsamic Poached Chicken), and we just add some kind of starch and veg to it as sides. We keep a lot of frozen veg for this purpose in the winter, and grill/roast a lot of them in the summer.
We try to limit eating out to one night a week, usually on Saturday because it makes a nice date night.

Ok, on to the tips!

1. Keep a list! This has always been crucial for me, even for weekly meal planning. For monthly planning, it's even more important. I keep a running list in my google docs of things we run out of during the month, as well as ingredients for the meals I've planned so I always know what I've started the month with, what ingredients go with certain recipes, what we have left at the end of the month, and what we'll need for the upcoming month.

2. Keep a spreadsheet! This is a new one for me. I was having a hard time making sure we got a good "rotation" for our proteins, and this has helped a lot. We try to have fish or some other kind of seafood two nights a week, and then I like to mix it up with chicken, pork, and the occasional red meat or vegetarian meal. I love pasta (hmm, think this has something do to with being overweight?), and now I can easily make sure we're not eating it too often. This also helps me determine what we need for the month. I actually make my list in the spreadsheet as well so it's all in one convenient place.

3. Keep track of recipes. Which is why I'm blogging again  =) I've found this is a very helpful to tag, rate, and review recipes so I can go back to them later when I'm looking for meal ideas. I used to keep them on my computer, but I found it was too hard to look up certain recipes and pretty much impossible to search based on ingredients.