M. Suzanne Terry

Recipe card by day (for Simply Scratch’s stuffed shells) – grocery guide by night.

Today we start Section 3 of our process – making your monthly plan.

You already have your staples list, which should include everything you need for basic staples, meal staples, and saving graces. You may, however, occasionally want to eat something that is not represented on that list. So now we are going to talk about the extra recipes you may need to include on your meal plan (and thus your grocery list). For these recipes, you will need recipe cards.

Some of you may only have these cards (or files, if you are using an electronic system) for special occasion recipes, especially if your meal staples are pretty constant throughout the year. My meal portion of my staples list only includes basic lasagna (with goat cheese instead of ricotta – no other cheese needed – DO IT) and tacos, because all my other meal staples change seasonally. Therefore, I have a lot of cards like the one pictured above.

These cards need to include 2 elements:

1. Ingredient list and instructions (i.e., the recipe itself)
2. Some indication of which ingredients are not a part of your staples list and thus will need to be added as extras to your grocery list.

My indications are color-coded. Green means the ingredient is outside my staples list. Each season also has its own color, because I differentiate between ingredients that have little hope of being in my kitchen at all (green) and those that tend to magically make an unscheduled appearance during a certain season (e.g., butternut squash in the fall, salad greens in the summer, etc.). Summer is yellow, fall is orange, winter is blue, and spring is red. Of course, you can just use one color if that makes more sense to you.

As you can see from the picture above, in order to make these particular stuffed shells, I basically need to buy everything but salt, olive oil, and eggs. Translation – not a recipe that I’ll be making the same month the car needs new tires. During that month, I’m going to choose a recipe that has maybe three things circled. These cards keep me from accidentally overextending my grocery budget.

Your goal for today is probably a big one, unless you have a stellar staples list that includes every meal you ever make except for major holidays. Which is…well…stellar. Good job, you!

1. Collect your non-staple recipes (whatever that looks like for you).
2. Circle all the non-staple items on your ingredient lists.  If your recipes are stored electronically, I recommend separating the staples (e.g., salt, olive oil, eggs) into different columns from the non-staples (e.g., arugula, Italian sausage) so that your copy-paste into a printable grocery list is easier.
3. File the recipes in some organized way – whatever works best for you. I have a recipe box. Flash drive works, too. If you store your recipes electronically, pleasepleaseplease make a back-up. That would be a really sad thing to lose.

Tomorrow we discuss how to revisit your kitchen inventory to choose meals for the month.

I’m sharing my Epic Meal Planning strategies for Write 31 Days – click to see the master list.