The Joy of Menu Planning + The Pain of Meal Planning
Or: why I don't plan all of my meals, but why I love planning particular menus (and how I do that)
Fantasizing about menus is fun for me. It makes me happy. Whether it’s dinner for my parents or thinking ahead for my Sunday classes, I take pleasure in figuring out the puzzle of what foods fit a particular occasion. I spent most of high school daydreaming about menus in the margins of my notebooks.
Scheduling out all of my meals, on the other hand, makes me feel the opposite of fun and happy.
How can both of those things be true?
Because the joy I feel around planning a singular menu evaporates when I think about planning all of my meals because doing that makes me feel like I’m on a diet.
At this point in my life, feeling like I’m on a diet makes me angry because diet culture can fuck all the way off (if this is shocking to you, welcome to my newsletter where diet culture, anti-fat bias, and other forms of white supremacy are not condoned!). At previous points in my life, feeling like I was on a diet, or actually being on one, made me feel a mixture of smug, anxious, judged, and prone to failure. Since meal planning triggers all of those feelings, I’ll pass.
It’s not just that meal planning brings up these feelings. It’s also that it prohibits spontaneity. One thing that has been enormously helpful in my eating disorder recovery is trying to eat as intuitively as possible— and with as little judgement as possible for wherever those intuitions lead me. Planning all of, or even many of, my meals in advance makes it very hard for me to be in touch with my intuition.
Choosing not to plan all of my meals has been liberating, yes, but it’s also a privilege. I’m not on a limited budget. I have plenty of time to think about what I want to cook and to actually cook it. I actually love cooking. I can afford, financially and practically, to not plan all of my meals in advance, which tangibly allows me to in the moment in my cooking and eating.
In other words, the notion of meal planning is complicated.
Virginia Sole-Smith, whose newsletter and work I am so grateful for, wrote about The Tyranny and Misogyny of Meal Planning last year. I highly recommend reading it not only for its plethora of excellent points, but also for her humorous writing.
As Virgina writes so well about, meal planning is not only closely aligned with diet culture, it’s also an enormous amount of labor.
So, you might be thinking, if I skip out on meal planning, how do I actually go about planning my meals? I cook with a spirit of abundance. I always make more than I know we can eat. If I’m going to grill some chicken, why not throw more stuff on the grill since I already have it on? If I’m going to soak and cook dried beans, I’m making the whole pound. I love cooking from leftovers. I wrote a whole book about it! It means everything I make already has one thing already crossed off the list.
When it comes to making these larger quantities of things like beans, grilled chicken and vegetables, and also things like I pot of rice or a skillet of greens, I always leave the batches quite plain so I can add different flavors as I use those things.
This way I’m not eating one endless pot of white bean soup. Maybe I'll turn the beans into soup one day. But the next day, I’m throwing those beans into a mixing bowl with a can of tuna and tons of lemon and olive oil and parsley for a hearty salad to eat on toast. Maybe the day after that I’m tossing some of those beans into a pot of garlicky olive oil and then adding some frozen spinach and mixing it with pasta and topping it with grated cheese. When something is plain, it can reappear in different ‘outfits’ throughout the week.
Cooking abundantly allows me to improvise without starting from scratch each time I’m hungry. It allows me to feel prepared without feeling overly planned.
For more specifics on how I figure out what to make for dinner every night, please see here.
And when it comes to planning fun menus for particular occasions, not just a prescription for my day-to-day meals, that’s where I get very excited and thought it might be fun to share a bit about my process.
I’ll use my Sunday afternoon cooking classes as an example since each one is a menu. I always think of these classes as dinner parties, even though no one is coming over. And I sure do love a theme for a party! So I try to make each menu have a theme. And I think this is a useful framework for planning any menu, even a really simple one.
I usually start with one thing I definitely want to make. This might be from looking at my previously published recipes and seeing if there’s something I love that I haven’t made in a while. Or maybe I have a memory from something I loved when I was younger. Whatever that one thing is, it becomes my anchor for planning the rest. The anchor informs the theme.
Your anchor can be anything. Maybe it’s a roast chicken, maybe it’s a bowl of homemade hummus that’s super creamy, maybe it’s the most beautiful tomato that you grew yourself or bought at the farmers market, maybe it’s eggs ….it definitely does not have to be a piece of meat! Once you have your anchor, it’s figuring out what compliments it and makes for a substantial meal.
Those other things, just like the anchor itself, do not have to be complicated. In addition to substance, I’m always looking for a variety of textures and flavors. If my anchor is that creamy hummus, I’m going to want something crunchy like a shaved fennel salad, something tart like lots of lemon on the salad, and something to make it all more filling like warm flatbread or a bowl farro dressed generously with olive oil and herbs.
If my anchor is tomatoes, I can turn them into summer’s greatest meal by toasting bread, slathering it with mayo, slicing the tomatoes and making sandwiches and serving those with crunchy potato chips and sour pickles.
And when all else fails, remember that pretty much everything you could make for lunch or dinner goes well with a salad and some bread.
Want to take a bit more of a detailed trip into my menu-writing process? Below is my ‘internal dialogue’ for how I came up with the menu pictured above for this class that I taught in February:
Campari Spritz
Orechiette with Spicy, Creamy White Beans + Parmesan
Lemon-Ricotta Cake
Flipping through Small Victories, I think: “oh I totally forgot about that pasta dish — the orecchiette with spicy sausage + parmesan…I haven’t made that in so long!”
People seem to love when I do vegetarian main dishes for class, and I like doing them, too. But some people do love meat. You know what, just make what you want to eat, Julia— not every class is going to be perfect for everyone! [welcome to my brain] Anyway, I wonder if there’s a way to make this without the sausage and have it still be filling + delicious. Beans! Beans are filling and delicious! And cheap! And easy to find!
Okay, I’ve updated the recipe so it’ll work with beans. Now I need something bright and tart and crunchy to balance all of that soft, creamy pasta. Salad! Salad is bright and tart and crunchy. And we don’t have to dirty another pot or pan. You know what would be best with this? An old-fashioned pizzeria salad, you know the iceberg with tomatoes and onions and a really vinegary vinaigrette with tons of dried oregano.
And what’s a good, easy dessert to go with this? [googles ‘Italian desserts,’ gets hungry for gelato, and then sees an image for a ricotta cake, then thinks to myself: I love a simple one pan cake]. I bet the batter from the Lemon Ricotta cupcakes I made in Simply Julia could easily just be a cake. But since there won’t be frosting, I need to add a little more sugar to the batter and let’s go ahead and add some more lemon.
Okay, I’m telling people to buy lemons…let’s use lemon in a drink. Campari and lemon is good, but campari is even better with orange. I bet it’d be great with both! Spritzes always use sparkling wine, but I’ll probably just drink one drink, two at the most, and Grace won’t have any and I don’t want to open a bottle of sparkling wine if I’m not going to use all of it. I can just use a can of seltzer! I should probably go make one of these just to make sure it’s good….[10 minutes later: confirmed!]
For paid subscribers with commenting privileges— do you meal plan? Menu plan? Have any feelings about either? What works for you? Doesn’t work?
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Thanks for being here.
I’m away next week on a trip, but I’ll be back after that. Take good care, everyone.
xo, Julia
It's so interesting to see different viewpoints on meal planning. I LOVE IT, but mostly because I'm very type-A. On the Notes app, I have a shared note with my husband where I keep track of what we'll be eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next week or so. Nothing brings me joy like creating those menus, adding stuff to my curbside grocery pickup order, and then checking it off my list. I do sometimes bemoan not being able to always chase my cravings, but I do try and leave some room for spontaneity! (And I also try and give myself some grace when it's been a long day and making a meal does NOT seem like the move, so we just order out or go somewhere.) But I'm with you on letting myself eat whatever may be calling to me in that moment, and try not to focus on what I "should" be eating, and just eating what my body tells me to. (Thanks, in part, to reading stuff from you!)
My sentiments echo very similarly Marcus' comment below. I feel comforted by having some of the week planned out but leave room to deviate to whims.
Looser plans have also become easier now that budget isn't the top priority. When money was tighter, looking at the sales flyer, planning an exact list to procure, and how to maximize every ingredient really helped stretch our dollars.
And as I've become a more confident cook this has gotten easier as well. I feel comfortable buying a few things that are looking good and figuring it out later without fretting over every detail up front. I really enjoyed your recent "Dinner doesn't have to be hard" post offering tips in this vein!
I appreciate you acknowledging that it often requires a certain amount of time or money privilege for a more spontaneous dinner approach to occur. But as you also mentioned it does require a lot of labor up front or confinement through the week and that's not the right system for others! So more power to everyone doing what works right for them. I've been loving all the conversations dismantling these ideas that there's one "right" way to do something!