M. Suzanne Terry

I confess an unholy obsession with jarred roasted peppers.

My pantry stays pretty well organized. Before you prepare to pat me on the back and ring out a hearty, “Great job!” you should know that this accomplishment is due more to the necessity of small space rather than to my organizational diligence. I have six shelves that are approximately a square foot apiece, and those few shelves house all shelf-stable food – from dry beans and jars of sauce to baking basics.

I was raised on a farm under the wide West Texas sky, so I like a lot of space. For everything. I have a few friends who love the tiny house movement, and when they post pictures of their favorite layouts, I think, “Oh, what a cute closet that is.”

But being short of space in the pantry has been a gift. It means that unless I want my stockpile to leak out onto my table and cabinet tops (which I do not, for the record), I have to keep it organized. It forces me to use the space wisely. I have to keep in mind what items are staples (which we will discuss later this week) and what items are extraneous.

Today, you have two tasks:

Task 1 – Take inventory of your pantry space by answering these questions:
1. How much space do you have? Is it enough? Is it too much?
2. Which of the items currently in your pantry are staples (i.e., things you use frequently)? Which of the items currently in your pantry are extras (e.g., junk food, leftover jars from a former recipe that you no longer plan to use, etc.)?

Task 2 – Reorganize your pantry, prioritizing things you will actually use. To do this, follow these steps:

• Take everything out of the pantry and set it on a table or some other open space.
• Divide items into these categories: keepers (things you know you will use within the next month or two), give-aways (things you will not use but can still be used by someone), and throw-aways (things you will not use and should not be ingested by anyone ever).
• Cut your pantry space in half. Yes – half. Don’t worry – this will not last, and you’ll have your space back by next week. We’re just carving out a little space to work with when we talk about staples.
• In your new, smaller space, put your keeper items back in. They may not all fit right now, and that’s okay. Just leave them out in the organizing space, and alert family, housemates, etc., that they are a temporary work in progress.
• Find friends or a local food bank where you can donate your give-aways. Toss your throw-aways in the garbage.

Once you have completed this, you will be ready to make your first meal plan tomorrow!

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

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Ominous-looking, isn’t it? Don’t be scared – show it who’s boss!

Before you can plan, before you can shop, before you can cook – you must take inventory. In the next few days, we will look at your pantry, make lists of all the things you could make without going to the store, and then make your first grocery list based on the things that you just need one or two ingredients to make something awesome (because you can’t wait to eat until the end of this month).

 Today, we are going to talk about the refrigerator.

 My fridge is my least favorite place to clean. No matter how many times I got advice from Mom or how many books/articles I read on the subject, the fridge is the one place that always seemed to get away from me. I’d do pretty well for a while, but soon I had more leftovers and weird odds and ends than I knew what to do with. So I used to do nothing (because I’m very mature and not at all avoidant of unpleasant tasks) and that’s how I ended up with forgotten, unrecognizable goop in a jar in the back of the fridge more often that I’d like to admit.

 Nothing worked until I took inventory and decided – once and for all – what belongs in my fridge and what does not.

 Step one is knowing what is there, right at this moment. You can write everything down if seeing it in list form helps you. For this stage, I prefer taking pictures, because I’m better at organization when I can see it spatially laid out.

 Step two is deciding what goes where. For this step, I did make a list of fridge rules. Until I consistently followed the rules, I put them on the front of my fridge as a reminder. Your rules may not be the same as mine, but here are mine as an example:

 – No half jars of obscure ingredients that you only used once for that one recipe that you didn’t really like and have no plan or desire to use again. I’m looking at you, capers.

– Stay aware of expiration dates. Expired items are a telltale sign that I kept something I never meant to use. There are many helpful lists online, such as this one, that will help you keep track of how long different foods keep in the fridge.

– No items whose size extends beyond the use I intended for them. Did I like that specialty marinade? Sure. Did I like it enough to justify buying the economy size bottle? No. Can I really use two dozen eggs in a week? Probably not, so that coupon that only works if you buy two doesn’t actually work for me. It’s not a bargain if half of it goes to waste.

– Limit space available for drinks (e.g., coconut milk, juice, white wine, etc.) to avoid having a shelf of half-empty cartons and bottles that will go bad before you use them.

If you live alone, this will be easier than if you live with others, particularly if they have varying orange juice pulp needs. In this case, I recommend having a family meeting where each family member gets their own space. That way, everyone gets to be picky about one thing. The rest of the allotted space is for things you share. For this space, everyone gets a say, but not everyone gets their way.

– Fight the urge to buy good-intentions ingredients. This is anything you have no actual plan to eat in the future or anything that requires more effort to prepare than you know you’re willing to spend on it.

 You’ll notice that I only have five rules. I recommend a short list, simply because you are more likely to keep the rules if they are small in number. If I stick to these five guidelines, I keep a much cleaner fridge, which leads to greater meal planning ease.

 We would be remiss if we didn’t also talk about what the rules for the freezer are. Your rules, like mine, might be an extension of the fridge rules. The main difference is that my freezer rules are a bit more relaxed because things last longer (but not forever) in the freezer. The freezer gives me an idea of what next month’s meals could be.

 So today, take your inventory and make your list of rules. Tomorrow, we tackle the pantry!

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

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I have a calendar that hangs in my kitchen that is specifically for meal planning. Once a month, I pull it down and schedule specific shopping days and specific cooking days, and I decide what I’m going to cook and use that to create my grocery lists. I try to aim for Friday evenings for shopping days, and I really prefer having lightly scheduled weekends for cooking time so that I don’t have to cook during the week.

I like having a plan because it keeps me from making habitual terrible food choices that zap my energy.  I do not like having to find an hour or two a month to produce said plan.

Enter epic meal planning.

This level of meal planning is not for the faint of heart. It is structured and detailed but also magically flexible. This is go-on-a-dangerous-quest, feed-a-horde-of-hangry-dragon-slayers, survive-NaNoWriMo-without-gaining-20-pounds meal planning.

Once you’ve completed this process, you will be able to make each month’s plan to feed yourself and your loved ones – choices, schedule, and lists – in about ten minutes. And once you’ve done it, it works forever. I occasionally tweak my plan – add some new, exciting ingredient to kitchen staples, add a new recipe I liked, archive an old recipe that doesn’t seem appealing anymore – but that only takes a few minutes.

Having a structured plan doesn’t mean that you can never find a new recipe on Pinterest, go straight to the market, and make it that night. It also doesn’t mean you have to give up the drive-through forever. It does mean that you have something to work with on all the other days (and will help you say no to making the drive through a major habit). It perpetually answers the “What will we have for dinner?” question.

I’m so certain that this process will work for you like it works for me that I’m writing a book about it. It started as getting posts ready for Write 31 Days and has morphed into something larger. The book will include a lot of my own personal recipes and tips on how to expand the plan to fit your personal lifestyle, but this blog series will get you started.

Here are a few things to know about my approach before we get started:

– I looooove leftovers. I can happily eat the same thing three or four times a week, especially if I can throw a poached egg on top and call it breakfast. My favorite weeks are those when I have an open weekend where I can cook three or four meals and just eat on those the whole next week.

If you do not share this love, this will still work for you. You’ll just need to cook more often. If you despise leftovers or have intense appetites in your household that make leftovers as elusive and mythical as a unicorn, and you don’t already have a meal planning system in place, then we are going to be besties by the end of this month. Having a plan will revolutionize your life. You’re welcome, and I love you, too.

– I am not you; you are not I. The minute details of our meal planning will be different because we are different people with different lives. I am single, and I live alone in a spacious two-bedroom apartment with a not-spacious kitchen and an abysmal lack of food storage space. My kitchen staples are probably going to look a lot different from yours. That’s okay – there is still something to be learned from that step.You may have more storage space and thus more freedom in this area than I do, and I encourage you to embrace it.

You may also probably shop less often than I do. You probably have a real pantry and a full-size freezer in your utility room or garage. I commend you on your great use of space. Feel free to send me pictures so that I can live vicariously through you, as having a pantry and extra freezer is one of the top five reasons I’m saving up to buy a house. If you have the space and would like suggestions of freezers to buy, I have been making eyes at a couple of units at Lowe’s and would be happy to advise.

Focus on the instructions, not the examples. The purpose of examples is to see how concepts might be applied, not to become the concepts themselves. The goal of this month is to create a plan that works for you, and that probably won’t work if you’re trying to replicate exactly what I do and eat.

– I’m 41. I’ve been the adult who is primarily responsible for my nourishment for quite some time. Most of the information I will pass on in the next thirty days is from my own trial-and-error experience. I also read a lot on the subject of food, and I will give recommendations for further study whenever the opportunity arises.

If you are twenty and have moved out of the dorm and away from its meal plan into your first apartment, there may be some things that I’ve forgotten to include simply because I am old and forget that people don’t know how to do them. First of all – welcome, and good for you! If I had started doing this when I was twenty years old, I would be a lot healthier right now and wouldn’t have had to unlearn so many bad habits to get to a decent relationship with food. Second, please feel free to ask questions. That’s what a comment section is for. And third, if you are currently staring into the blank canvas that is your first kitchen, a couple of great additional resources for getting started are Alton Brown’s Gear for Your Kitchen and Kallio and Krastins’s The Stocked Kitchen.

– You can use a computer to collect recipes and compile your grocery lists, and I encourage this if you are starting fresh, because copy-paste-print is super efficient. If you prefer to kick it old school (as I do), you’ll need a recipe box with dividers, index cards, a pen, a hole punch, and a binder ring (for shopping purposes). For both methods, you will need some sort of calendar system to assign meals to days. Regardless of which method you use, once you’ve completed the overall process, meal planning will be a breeze.

If you want to review any section we have covered, they’ll all be archived here (archive may be delayed on days I’m without a computer, but all links will be up by the end of the month):

Section One – Pre-planning Phase: Taking Stock

Day 2 – Confronting the Fridge

Day 3 – Confronting the Cupboard

Day 4 – If I Got Snowed in Right Now…

Day 5 – Grocery List #1

Day 6 – Shopping Day #1

Section Two – Planning Phase 1: Making Lists

Day 7 – Basic Staples

Day 8 – Meal Staples

Day 9 – Saving Graces

Day 10 – Recipes for Fall

Day 11 – Recipes for Winter

Day 12 – Recipes for Spring

Day 13 – Recipes for Summer

Day 14 – Breakfast

Day 15 – Grocery List #2

Day 16 – Shopping Day #2

Day 17 – Freezer Tips

Section Three – Planning Phase 2: Monthly Planning

Day 18 – Recipe Cards

Day 19 – Revisiting Inventory

Day 20 – Master Calendar

Day 21 – Shopping Days, Cooking Days

Day 22 – Schedule Reminders

Day 23 – Grocery List #3

Day 24 – Shopping Day #3

Section Four – Planning Phase 3: Entertaining and Special Occasions

Day 25 – Traditions

Day 26 – Party Planning

Day 27 – Anticipating Needs

Day 28 – Recipes – Finding New Loves and Rekindling Old Flames

Section Five – Review

Day 29 – Self-Awareness

Day 30 – Space-Awareness

Day 31 – Flexibility

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