Menu Planning: How the fuck do you manage your meals, guys?

Meal planning is one of my least favorite chores. My kids aren't picky necessarily, but they have very divergent tastes, which means finding a meal that both of them will eat is an absolute pain in the neck.

We're also a one income family currently. Meal planning is essential, because it lets me catch things on sale and make our grocery budget stretch as far as humanly possible.

I've tried a couple of different systems over the years, but my favorite so far (the one I am currently using) is, oddly enough, the most complicated. This is weird, because usually I work on my systems until they are as simple as possible, because I've found that we are not complicated people. The more complicated a system is, the less likely we are to use it, use it regularly and use it well.

Nevertheless, this system works for me.

It all started with a whole bunch of leftover index cards. The packs were opened, so it didn't feel right to donate them, but they were all unused so it didn't feel responsible to throw them away either.

Thus they languished in a drawer for, oh, forever. Just about, anyway, give or take a day or two.

Then it occurred to me to use them to organize my menu planning. I started by going through my cookbook and writing down the recipes at the tops of the index cards. I color-coded them (because that is how I do, y'all) to reflect entrees, starches, veggies, breads, and fruits.

Each card then has the ingredients for that recipe, broken down by category the way that I do my grocery list.

When I plan my menu, I have a card for each day of the week that I lay out, and then I line up the ingredient cards underneath them. Then I can play with moving them around based on what we have going on each day or whether there are particularly similar meals too close together.

It looks a little something like this.

Then, I make my grocery list based on checking off what ingredients on the card I already have and which ones I need.

Eventually, I plan on laminating them so that I can use a dry erase marker on the cards themselves to mark off what I already have.

The cards are stored in an index card file when I'm not using them, which sits with my cookbooks.

I had tried a few different systems before this--just flipping through my binder of recipes and making the list was one. I also tried pulling out all of the recipes for the week and storing them in a separate file, using the recipes themselves to make the grocery list. But something about having the cards with the ingredients already listed by section makes it easy--I just fill it in section by section on my list. No loose papers to deal with during the week.

I figure meal planning is something that 99.9% of households probably have in common, so dish: What's your system, guys?