A number of people have asked how I make my meal plans each week, so I spent too much time and went into too much detail this morning. Please! Bore yourself and read on! If you just want some links to some vegetarian dinners, skip to the end!

Google documents, google calendar, my iPhone (previously, my iPod touch), and online resources like Pinterest, foodgawker, and blogs (read on google reader) make it possible for me to work in the way that I do. Mike and I share our google calendars with one another, and these are synched onto our iPhones. On my calendar, one of the subcalendars is Meal Planning. A while ago I set up two recurring events: Lunch and Dinner. Both are set for Monday through Friday, same time each day (1–2pm, 730–830pm, respectively). The time is largely irrelevant and sometimes we don’t assign a meal for all of the slots. If we go out to eat before a movie, for instance, I may just write "Chipotle" in there, or I may just delete the slot from the calendar altogether if that meal is part of a formal event like "H&M Dinner with Jeremy at Hill Country Chicken." We very rarely eat out for lunch—perhaps once a month—but I like to plan it in as a little treat sometimes. It's also a good way to compensate for a week when we don't have enough leftover-producing dinners (see: “Out” for Thursday’s lunch in the calendar below). I don’t make a recurring slot for Saturday/Sunday because those meals are often elaborate (note this coming Saturday's "kitchen adventures" with Luke and Lisa) or sometimes two in one (like a big brunch that tides us over for two meals). Breakfast is not noted on the calendar either, as Mike and I have our standard ruts that we're in. I usually eat some combo of the following: Greek yogurt, homemade granola, uncooked oats, cooked oatmeal, frozen berries, seasonal fruit. Mike usually eats one of the following: cooked oatmeal, Cheerios. On weekends, I typically make us a big batch of smoothies and some kind of omelette or muffin or something, but that's based on whim because I always have serviceable ingredients on hand. In one go, I either plan a full week or sometimes just six days depending on when we’re able to fit in grocery shopping. (And for you non–New Yorkers, we walk 15 minutes to the grocery store and carry an entire week’s worth of groceries home! If it’s an absolute ton or if we rode our bikes, we get delivery.)

If I'm really on the ball, I'll get started midweek so my plan doesn't take any long sit-down time and is instead assembled piecemeal, sometimes on the train, sometimes at work, sometimes when I'm surfing the internet at night. That's the beauty of the documents being stored in the cloud—I can add one recipe to the calendar at a time, tack the ingredients on the shopping list, sync it to my phone, and then kick that information out of my brain and switch to another task. I like it when I'm that thorough. I'm not usually that thorough. Most often I sit down on Saturday mornings to "finish up" the list (read: "do all of it except for the one meal I already planned").

First, I look at our weekly events calendars. I obviously don’t have to worry about any days we’re both planning to be somewhere, and on days that I’m going to be out, I know that Mike will be the only one eating, so I ask him what he wants to make/eat. He frequently takes this opportunity to make seafood for himself. Then I go to my variety of resources (blogs, cookbooks, magazines, etc.—usually collated on Pinterest) and figure out what I want to make. I try to cook meals that obey the following restrictions, thanks to Mike’s doctor-ordered diet (which is actually a boon because it's forcing me to step outside of my Heather Loves Carbs and Cheese comfort zone): low-cholesterol, lower-carb (rather, we try to avoid too many simple carbs), low-sugar, low-meat, low-dairy (on account of the dairy fat/cholesterol, though note that we use LOTS of fat-free Greek yogurt and lowfat cottage cheese). As such, many of our meals these days revolve around legumes. We eat lots of lentils and beans, a fair amount of tofu, and at least one quinoa dish a week (it makes great lunches!). If we do eat meat, which I try to keep to two meals a week at most, it’s usually poultry. Our weekend meals are slightly more extravagant and going really low-cholesterol during the week allows this kind of “wildness” (note: It's never actually THAT wild. Our wildness today is eating some feta cheese in some croquettes, but last week it was a moderately rich meal that had some butter, cheese, chicken, etc., and the weekend before I made carnitas tacos). I try to spread the cholesterol-"heavier" days throughout the week (for instance, I don't like Mike eating chicken leftovers for lunch if we’re also having poultry for dinner) as well as those that have a lot of simple carbs (any pasta/bread, though note that we’re switching mostly to quinoa/multigrain pasta these days, and half the time I make rice it's brown rice). Also, Mike doesn’t like to eat last night’s dinner for lunch today, so I assign leftovers to be eaten two days later.

[This would be a good time to mention that I try to keep Mike well below 200mg cholesterol a day, and most days we're WAAAAY under that. Once his blood is retested in five months, we'll see how much we can wiggle beyond this restrictive diet we're on. The method of food planning won't change much, though. Before this diet came on, I would spread out the meatier meals, or spread out the pasta meals, or spread out the cheesy meals, just for variety. Similar concept.]

I plug a dinner meal that looks good into a spot on the calendar that makes sense, timewise, for that evening, and always immediately pop the lunch into a spot two days later. On this calendar, I knew I wanted to make split pea soup because a coworker had given me a pound of split peas (she'd overbought at the market) and we're running out of chilly weather in which to truly relish them. I popped that into Monday and put the leftovers on Wednesday. Then, before I pick my next meal, I copy the ingredient list from the recipe into my grocery list and sort the items into the correct category (produce, meat, dairy, dry goods, bakery, etc.). Back in the day, at this point I’d also print the recipe, but now I enter them into an online program so they can sync to a kitchen-specific tablet computer I got free from work (by the way, I don't recommend it as a product, but it keeps us paperless). I choose recipes based on my work schedule; I pick a shorter recipe if I know I’m going to come home late, or if we have to do laundry, and try to put stuff that I know won’t generate leftovers on nights toward the end of the week (since we won’t eat those leftovers on Sat/Sun, generally). If we're having guests, I pick larger-yield meals or ones that can be partially prepared in advance. It’s meals that don’t generate leftovers that cause the most trouble, because they leave open lunch spots, but we also run out of leftovers for lunch if we have a dinner guest, which is common (usually I’ll give the leftovers to Mike and make a salad for myself, as I like it more than he does). Sometimes, if I have two open lunch spots for whatever reason, I’ll make a dish on Sunday night (not for dinner) that can be used for two lunch slots during the week, but I like to avoid that if I can. Good candidates for these lunch-only meals are bean or chickpea salads, as they keep well.

The other thing I try to do when planning meals is pick recipes that use some of the same ingredients that I have to buy in large quantities. For instance, if I’m using mint in one meal, I’ll try to make another meal that contains mint (alternately, I turn it into mint simple syrup and keep it in my fridge). Or if I use half a clamshell of grape tomatoes, I pick another recipe that'll use the rest. Herbs are the biggest pain (how often does a recipe call for an entire bunch of cilantro?), so I will try to plan something like a Mexican meal AND an Indian meal and maybe a Thai meal in the same week so I can use all that cilantro. Our goal is always zero food waste. We're not quite there, but we're close. [Side note: I also try to keep as many of our veggie scraps as I can, in the freezer, for making stock. I like making food out of "nothing"!]

The grocery list is a shared document and I sync it up with my iPhone using a program called NoteMaster Lite (free!). The reason you’ll see those numbers and underlines for every item is that they render as checkboxes in NoteMaster (which was shown above in this post). That means I can check off each item as we go through the store. More paperless meal planning! My grocery list is organized by section in the order we shop at our specific Whole Foods. Since we go there every week, I also organize it by aisle. I know which produce we’ll walk by first, or the fact that we’ll pass oils before we pass bulk items before we pass baking items. I do this so we don’t miss anything and it makes these large shopping trips easy to handle. It’s second nature at this point because I’m really familiar with the store, but there are some grocery list phone apps that will “memorize” your store’s layout for you—the first time you shop, you just check your stuff off and it remembers the order in which you picked the things up off the shelves. I’m not that fancy, but it sounds cool. Oh! And the question marks? Those just denote something that I'll need but which we may have in the kitchen—since I'm usually on the computer, I mark this stuff down and then add a ? if I want to check the kitchen before we head out. Sometimes stuff gets deleted (walnuts, for example, from this list).

As I said, if I’m really good, I’ll start planning meals about halfway through the week, but usually I sit down to do it on Saturday morning. It takes me a while only because I get really distracted by the internet and because I’m so interested in trying new recipes so I dig around blogs a lot and read the comments and stuff. I used to cook a lot of old standbys and meal planning went much quicker, but we had less variety. The advent of Pinterest has helped because I’ll pin things throughout the week and know I want to make them the next week, so when I sit down to plan my meals, I just pull up my New Regime Meals board and plug the recipes in where they seem like they’ll fit best. On Pinterest, I'll delete pins if I make a recipe and don't like it, because the hope is that soon I'll be able to just glance through that visual board and pick out five recipes that I know are fantastic. We're getting there.

Here are the links to the various recipes you see in the calendar this week:
Arugula and Penne Salad with Chickpeas (Friday’s dinner that Mike’s having for dinner on Sunday when I’m at church -- I doctored the heck out of this so it barely resembles this recipe anymore)

Black-Eyed Pea Curry (leftovers from Thursday that I was supposed to eat on Friday and didn’t, so it’s my lunch on Monday.)

Split Pea Soup (I will almost certainly add some carrots to this, because COME ON)

Quinoa Salad with Roasted Tomatoes, Olives, and Walnuts (I will probably add some herbs and acid to this.)

Zucchini Croquettes which will go into veggie gyros (tonight’s dinner, leftovers for lunch during the week.)

Pea Pesto Ravioli (made a ton of these a while ago, froze most. Using them for dinner the night we’re doing laundry, since meal will take at most 15 minutes, which is largely the time it'll take to make a quick sauce out of canned diced tomatoes. Pro tip: If you don't have shallots, do not substitute extra garlic. They will be wicked pungent.)

White Bean Soup with Pesto (I'll be using my homemade pesto for this, which is in the freezer.)

By the way, this entire crazy process was inspired by my friends the Dunbars, with whom I lived for several months many years ago. They were kind enough to take me in after a shake-up in my housing situation, but one caveat was that I had to help out with the family dinners. They'd make a chart with all the meals (including snacks for the kids) and I cooked once or twice a week. This is just a higher tech version. Amusingly, I found this kind of preplanning really restrictive at the time but now love it...and the Dunbars don't do it anymore. When I lived alone, I was a “shop after work, buy whatever I want, eat at 10pm” kind of gal. That doesn’t fly in our lives now, and I’ve come to LOVE the weekly grocery shop (which, you can see, gets planned into the calendar). It’s so nice to have everything you need on hand, never run out of ingredients. It's also easy to add anything to the week's upcoming grocery list as soon as it is used up. Did I use the last of the vegetable oil on Wednesday? I enter it into the (likely empty) grocery list right away so when I sit down to actually prepare the meal plan I don't have to remember what we exhausted the week before. Pantries, yo. Make them work for you.

Are you bored of hearing about my crazy food planning yet? I'm bored of writing about it! Let's be finished! If you have any questions, hit me. I'd also love to hear any recommendations for food blogs—I'm always expanding my list and sometimes it's hard to find reliable recipe sources (as in, reliably delicious).