Home cheffing - the weekly family menu

My wife married me because I can cook. I’m only partially joking. I’m now the home chef.

It’s been a few years since I started preparing a weekly menu on a Google Sheet for the following week. Since beginning the process, I noticed a few positive results:

1. I waste nowhere as much food as I did beforehand. When I do the weekly grocery shopping, I base it on what I plan to cook.
2. I spend less time wondering what I will cook once meal time comes around.
3. We eat less takeaway food, because I have already planned a (relatively) healthy meal.

The main disadvantages of the approach are:

1. I don’t as easily improvise or try new recipes.
2. Our weekly menu tends to be pretty repetitive, especially if you keep being mindful of what meals everyone will enjoy.

I have tried a few times to mitigate the disadvantages, but without lasting success yet.

The process and factors  

When it comes time to do the weekly menu, I look at four things:

1. The family calendar for next week.
2. The Google Sheet with the weekly menu.
3. A mental note with the notable contents (e.g. close to expiry) of the pantry, freezer and fridge.
4. The weather forecast for next week.
5. (optional) The canteen menu for the kids at school.

The weather forecast is more relevant in certain seasons than others, but I tend to look at it anyhow. If a lot of rain is forecast, something bright and colourful is something I need, for instance.

The family calendar is a fairly obvious one, as it helps me determine if I have time to cook and if all family members will be present or not. It’s obvious, yet for the first year, I didn’t check it regularly, and I got caught out at times with having more food in the fridge than I actually needed or could prepare.

I have a large monitor, and I try to place the calendar and the spreadsheet next to each other.

The Google Sheet is not complicated, but feel free to copy and use the Excel template I made.

Each column represents a week, and I have a row for each lunch and dinner of the week, totaling 14 rows. The lunch rows are usually empty Monday to Friday when the kids are at school.

Then I simply start filling in the cells with what comes to mind, or I scroll back through the past to look for inspiration. Once you start filling in recipes, you begin to think about the balance of the meals, such as avoiding carbohydrate-rich meals in sequence.

The process usually takes me between 10 and 15 minutes. I sometimes wish for more variety, but there are relatively few meals that at least 3 of the 4 of us enjoy. I occasionally try an experimental dish to see if it can become part of the rotating list of dishes.

On weekends with few social engagements, I also tend to do some batch cooking to save some time during the coming weeks. I will often make tomato-based sauces, stews, lasagnas or oven-ready meals.

You can combine the planning with the weekly shopping  

I usually plan the weekly menu and then place an online order with the grocery store immediately afterwards. I start by adding the ingredients needed for the dishes of the following week, before adding the rest of the food and home products we will need.

It’s a routine that seems to work well for us, and the fun part is that the kids are all excited about the amount of choice they have for breakfast on weekends.

Things that didn’t pan out  

I attempted two additional initiatives on top of the process I described, but they didn’t take hold.

I tried keeping a log of the food in the freezer, including both ready-made meals and half-prepared food I had cooked. It lasted for a couple of months, but I would often forget to keep the list up to date, and I stopped using it.

I also had an idea to keep a log of the weekend food prep, but I entered only one entry and completely forgot about it.

My wife is also keen on changing the background of cells containing meals that were successful with the whole family, and this is one approach I wish I had taken. When looking into the past for inspiration, it would make it easier to find good options.

Having said that, I think that a separate tab with a list of recipes, maybe separated by type and/or seasonality, is a better alternative that I may try to implement in the months to come.