Cookbook Meal Planning

Today I am so excited about my new meal planning idea!

I seem to constantly be trying to figure out what to make for dinner. (Like millions of other people right!?)  The first title I had for this post was "The Saga of Meal Planning". I'm always saying that I need to meal plan in advance, do more freezer cooking, etc. I just never quite seem to get it done. I mean I have shining moments here and there, but for the most part I just seem to fail miserably at it and I'm scrambling to figure out what to cook each night.

At the same time, I am a cookbook lover. I mean I have a lot of them, like a whole lot. A few I've bought myself over the years, some I inherited from family, but the majority of them have been gifts because my family knows how much I love cookbooks. I started getting them probably as a teenager, or in college, and I get super excited about each one I receive.

I love looking through them and seeing all the delicious possibilities I could make. And while I have gotten use out of them (a good bit out of some) I never use them quite as much as I'd like. There are still TONS of yummy recipes waiting for me to give them their turn in my kitchen.


Then Pinterest came along and I started gathering tons of recipes there too which left my cookbooks even more neglected. I love Pinterest for finding recipes and all sorts of other things, but I'm really not a fan of having my nose stuck to my phone searching through the internet which in our neck of the woods is spotty at best and often frustrating. Doing this as you need to be getting dinner going is even more frustrating.


So, while these cookbooks sit around waiting to get some love, we make the same old standbys for dinner over and over again. Sigh.


Well, I recently had an idea that would help me address not one but both of these dilemmas! I pulled out a few of my favorite cookbooks one afternoon when I had a few minutes to spare and started looking for inspiration for dinners. While I was thumbing through, seeing once again all the great possibilities there were for getting me out of my dinnertime rut, a light bulb went off!


So here it is. (Drumroll please!) My cookbook meal planning plan. (Did that sentence even make sense?)


I'm going to take a few minutes to sit down and go through a cookbook. I'll make a note of the recipe titles and page numbers that look particularly interesting (and doable easy for weeknight dinners). Then each week I'll go over that list and pick out a few for dinner the next week. I'll go to the page numbers and make a list of ingredients to purchase at the grocery store, make a plan for food prep, and viola menu plan for the week and I finally make use of my cookbooks!


As I make it through one cookbook I'll start with another. Or perhaps I'll end up adding the list for each cookbook as I have the time and just choose recipes across all of them whether I've finished the first list or not. I'm still working out the details, but hey I have a starting point!

Of course I'm sure we will still make some of the standbys and favorites, but this will at least give me something new and different on a couple of nights each week. I plan to mark new favorites we find along the way too. That way we can put them in the "rotation" or if we find out something is not really our thing, we can make note of that too. But at least we'll have tried it!


I have tried for a long time to come up with a way of menu planning that works for me, so I am hoping this one does the trick. Plus bonus it will help me finally make better use of all my cookbooks! Then I won't have to feel so guilty for seeing new cookbooks in the store and wanting them too. I can stop seeing them and having to tell myself "No, no, no, you have shelves full already that you don't use. You can't buy yourself another cookbook!"


I'll let you know how it goes and what new favorites we find. I'm so excited to have a plan that I feel like I can actually do. It really is the little things in life! :)