Grocery Shopping

I have a system. It's the reason we're able to make such wonderful food, even during the busiest weeks. I thought people might be interested to see the more practical side of making fun dinners.

This is generally my Sunday ritual. It can take as little as 20 minutes to plan everything, and we get great meals all week long!!!

Step 1: Pick recipes for the whole week

This is the part that you can either zip through or spend an hour pouring over recipes. My top three sources of inspiration online are Gojee, Epicurious, and blogs such as A Cozy Kitchen.

Gojee is appealing because it has gigantic pictures of delicious food at every turn. It's gorgeous and it runs on links to other food blogs, so you get to explore food blogs you would never have found otherwise. It's no good if you think to yourself "I really want to make stroganoff." You search Gojee by ingredient, not by dish, so it can be hard if you really want a specific dish. If you're in the mood for something made from egg noodles or roasted red peppers, however, type it in and you can scroll through tons of beautifully photographed, delicious ideas.

Epicurious is brilliant because they archive all my favorite food magazines (Gourmet, Bon Appetit). Their whole site is easy to use (here's where I go when I decide I want to search for that stroganoff recipe) and you can organize your favorites into folders for ease of use. When you amass 300 recipes or so like I have, it's a lifesaver to toss them all in folders where I can just immediately pull up the soups and find the one I was thinking of.

My folders.

A Cozy Kitchen is brilliant. First timers should hit up the recipe index for all the archived genius.

So obviously I can spend a lazy Sunday flipping through recipes and dreaming, but eventually I do coalesce all of it into a plan for the week.

Step 2: Decide what you're making when

I like to edit my lists on a Google doc. You'll see why soon.

This is where I can look at the week and decide where I have time to spend 45 minutes on dinner and what nights I should just make grilled cheese because I have a paper due. I also make sure to plan for leftovers (big things like soups and lasagnes generally have leftovers, so I try not to plan too many of those types of dishes in one week or we won't have room in the fridge to store it all.

I start by just listing the recipes (below). If I get the recipes online, I copy-paste the link right below it. If it's in a book or elsewhere, I indicate that, too. Question marks indicate ideas that I'm not sure of. I always like to ask John and Priya for input, so I am pretty flexible at this stage. 

I also like to look through the recipes and see how the ingredients measure up in terms of expense and use. For example, if a risotto calls for half an onion, I try to figure out another recipe to use up the rest of that onion. Anything that is perishable or gets cut I try to use up. I also sometimes get all the ingredients pulled up and realize it's going to be too expensive to do all those dishes that week, so I pull a recipe from the list.

Then I organize things into days. Snacks, muffins, desserts, etc usually just go below.

Step 3: Ingredients

Then I add all of the ingredients, recipe by recipe. Question marks indicate that I think we may have some of it and should check before I buy more. I always get the list completely organized, check the kitchen, then go out to shop. It has saved me several times to do a quick check, and by knowing all the question marks ahead of time I can check around once instead of 8 times as I'm making the list.

The last step is super OCD and not necessary, but it also saves time.

Step 4: Organize the ingredients by the store sections

I'm not talking aisle by aisle...who has the supermarket aisles completely memorized? Ok, so my mother in law does, but she's amazing at this sort of thing. My lists pale in comparison to hers.

But I at least group things generally. All the produce together, all the dairy together, all the frozen stuff together, all the canned stuff together, any special things like fancy cheeses or bakery. It saves me headaches. I implemented this last step after getting to the opposite end of the store and realizing I needed something back in produce one too many times. I hate running all over the store. It takes longer and it's frustrating. So although this last step feels fussy, it's worth it in the long run.