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Me

I like to feed my family, serving up interesting, nutritious meals that I have cooked. It makes me happy and fulfils me. Cooking for me should be done from fresh, raw ingredients, that way I know what I’m feeding my family and I can, through my hands,(this bit is a bit weird), inject the meals with love.

I am the main cook in the family taking on the responsibility if I’m at home. This has not always been the case, though I have had that responsibility for over 7 years.

Despite the joy, love and attention, there was a problem. One I think others share.

The problem

A few years ago, my family and I found ourselves in a culinary rut. We had about 10 dishes that I cooked, rotating through them week in week out. They were 10 good dishes, we enjoyed them, they were generally cooked from fresh ingredients, but still just 10 and most were pasta based. The dishes had changed over the years but the number hadn’t. For special occasions, or when I had more time, I would dive into a recipe book and knock up something more special but even then I probably had 5 favourites that had work well over the years that I would return to.

We were happy, but we wanted more diversity, but with our busy work and family schedules we couldn’t escape our firm favourites. We wanted to eat more vegetarian and vegan meals, some of the 10 were vegetarian but none were vegan, we wanted to eat a wider variety of vegetables and carbohydrates. We also wanted to cut down on our food waste – it wasn’t a big problem but we definitely could have been doing better.

So, we set about changing the way we plan, shop and cook to enable diversity. It took a while but several years on we have around 200 recipes that I cook from and rather than cooking the same thing once every two weeks, it is now once in every three months.

40% of our meals are now vegetarian, of which just under half are vegan. We still eat a lot of pasta, but we now regularly eat a multitude of different grains.

Our original culinary rut does not appear to be an uncommon story, when I talk to people about my cooking journey many recognised the same problem and aspiration in their culinary lives.

Through this blog I aim to shared what we did to change and ultimately the technology we have used to achieve it.

The ingredients

For most keen cooks, it is relatively easy to cook something different over a weekend, but it is hard to do that every night of the week. You need to decide what to cook (the hardest part), have the ingredients and then the time is a challenge.

We as a family (I did not do this alone) managed this and I believe it is with most people capabilities (if they are interested to do the same). Though may be not come up with all the tech support, but more of that later.

The key ingredients we needed to change the what we ate, getting beyond the 10 firm favourites were:

• Time and energy
• Recipes
• Planning

Time and energy

Of these key ingredients, time is probably the hardest to find for most of us. The main part being, having the time to cook each evening, the planning also takes time as well. In order to make a change, I made the commitment to be home from work by 7:15pm every day, that would then give me 45 minutes to have a meal on the table for 8pm. This coincided with my daughter starting secondary school and the shift in her hours which made eating all together at 8 viable – but no later.

There are a lot of great, tasty and wholesome recipes that can take 30 to 45 minutes to cook. Not much longer than cooking your standard pasta and sauce.

Cooking also requires energy after a long day at work or family activities, that energy can feel hard to find. For me cooking is how I move on from the workday. It is often sited that creating separation between work and what comes next is good for your mental health and family life. Post pandemic with a lot more working from home it is hard to create this. So why not do something creative in the kitchen to create that separation.

I strongly suggest if cooking can do this for you, that you make a similar commitment that I did to cook.

However, time is not just required for cooking. Time is also required for planning and for shopping. The planning time is going to require energy, but is where you can really make a difference. As well as committing time to cook you also need to commit time to plan. When and how to do this planning took a lot of working out for us.

Shopping is shopping, it’s a chore, it has to be done. Online shopping can really help and the process we went through can help make online shopping work much better. For some shopping, picking and choosing direct from the stall or shelf may be an intrinsic part of feeding the family, though not for me. I have to say I something feel a bit bad about this, something I should probably explore at some point.

Recipes

If you want to cook something different most nights you do need a good source of recipes, that fit your tastes and time.

For recipes the initial answer for us (to start with at least) was the BBC Good Food webs site.  This site has thousands of recipes that are generally quick and easy to follow, with not too many hard to find ingredients. They are clear on quantities and cooking time.

The search functionality on BBC Good Food is great. Put a couple of ingredients you have or want to use and the website will come up with a recipe.

I can’t be certain what the first recipe was on our culinary journey, but I believe it was a Carrot, Farro and Feta salad. As I mentioned, we wanted to experiment with new grains and this was pretty much the first recipe you will come across if you search for Farro. I don’t know why we started with Farro but we popped it into Good Food and got started.

From Good Food I have expanded to a range of recipe books and recipe cards collected from supermarkets, which have all contributed to the 200 plus recipes.

Making time and having access to a good source of recipes only got us so far, it got us from 10 to maybe 25 dishes, though not used consistently. What really made a difference for us was planning.

Planning

Our planning has evolved a lot over the last few years. Evolution started from the fact that while I took on all the cooking, my wife, Abigail, retained responsibility for the shopping. This was mainly done via a big internet shop once a week and then top-ups from the local supermarkets.

When we first lived together, I did most of the cooking and shopping, but as our roles swapped and swapped back, the two tasks got separated which is what drove us to taking planning seriously.

When one of you is the cook and the other the shopper, you just can’t get very far without some planning, otherwise you never going to have the ingredients you need. This started with Abigail sitting the family down once a week before the big shop and asking what are we going to eat for the week ahead. This was usual done at a mealtime, after all we were all together, but when you have just eaten it is hard to think about other meals. I find it better to be a little hungry when you are planning meals.

During these original planning sessions, we would all try and remember things we’d liked but hadn’t had recently, and Abigail would write these down on a scrap of paper and pin it to our notice board. I knew what I was cooking each night and Abigail knew roughly what to buy. But as I mentioned above, while this kept us sane, it had only got us for 10 dishes to 25 and we had no real idea how diverse or vegetarian we were being.

In early 2020, the 9^th of January to be exact, I evolve this system to a whole new level. I put the weekly list into a spreadsheet, yes a spreadsheet. Now we did have a big screen computer in our kitchen that was used for all that Internet shopping.

Putting the list into a spreadsheet on a networked drive meant that it could be accessed from any of our computers or phones, it also meant we had a history of what we’d cooked. Hence knowing the exact day we started.  Right from the start I also categorised what the carb (pasta, rice, potatoes etc.) was for the meal and what the protein (chicken, cheese, nuts etc.) was. This was an important piece of the puzzle, it meant that it was easier to track our diversity it also made it easier to find dishes we had not had recently.

This was 2020 so the next thing to happen was of course lockdown.

We were already established internet shoppers, but now we really didn’t want to visit a local (or otherwise) supermarket to top up. Also, delivery slots were suddenly hard to come by and their contents needed to be locked down almost a week in advance.  This is where the spreadsheet came into its own. With just a bit of extended planning we push the spreadsheet out further into the future.

About this time I started adding the vegetables we would have on the side, Abigail has this thing about having two green veg with every meal, which is really healthy thing to do. It also stopped me using the weeks supply of broccoli early in the week when it was required towards the end.

One year in the spreadsheet was working well. I extended it by adding some pivot tables to analyses the meals. At the start of 2021, I then set myself a new challenge, which was to not cook the same meal twice over a three month period. I succeeded on all but three occasions, cooking 87 different dishes from January through to the end of March. I can of course tell you the 3 dishes that I cooked twice, which were: Mac & Cheese, Goat's cheese, red pepper, mushroom & pesto fusilli traybake and Lemon crusted salmon & roasted new potatoes.

Since then I have worked to a 90 day rule, minimizing the repeats and inserting new recipes when the mood take me, taking up to 150 recipes by the end of 2021.

One additional comment is all this planning makes internet shopping easier as you can do a whole weeks shopping with a clear idea of what you are going to eat. Not only does this make the shopping easier, it should cut down on food waste as you are only buying what you are going to cook (if you keep to the plan).

The spreadsheet process

The spreadsheet process by the end of 2021 became that once a week I would sit down with spreadsheet and plan out the following weeks meals. There were a couple of fixed points in the week, we had fish on a Tuesday night (it’s bin night) and something particularly quick on a Wednesday night (it was Zoom Pilates).  I then looked at the more time consuming recipes that we have not had recently or new recipes I wanted to try, which got put into the weekend. We try to have one type of carb only once a week certainly no more that twice, so I would select what carbs to have on the remaining days that didn’t have a meal yet assigned. Then for each incomplete day I searched using one of the pivot tables for meals that are based on that carb which we had not yet had that quarter.

Pivot tables are an easy way to turn a excel spreadsheet into something you can query like a database. I’d been scared of them for years but found them easy enough to learn, but then I did know my way around Excel.

Also of help was a notes column in the sheet in which we recorded who was going to be in for meals and if we going to be out.

Once I had a week’s worth of meals, I then looked back at what green veg we have had with the selected dishes.

Then I checked that it made sense, that we are not having spinach for three night running or that I haven’t selected two middle eastern dish two nights in a row. If required I’ll make some adjustment, maybe push a meal to the following week and find a replacement. I say I did this checking, it would actually be Abigail who would kindly point our such anomalies.

My job was then done, Abigail then sorted out the shopping, refering to the meal planner spreadsheet and then looking up the ingredients for the selected dishes, checking that we have what is required or adding them to the shopping list. Which to be honest is the really hard work. I didn’t actually realise how hard this was until I watched her preparing for the weekly shop, peering into the recipe books as well as going through all the store cupboards. I had at least made this possible by including the source and page numbers in the meal plan.

I realised I needed to do better to make our process sustainable and set able solving this but it took all of 2022, but that is getting ahead of the story. There is more to our success at the end of 2021.

The Extras

There are a couple of extras that have really helped with the meal planning process. In no particular order these are:

• Store cupboard
• Servings and measurement
• Glass leftover dishes
• Notes

Store cupboard

This brings me the last key element of the system, a good store cupboard. When you are using more ingredients you need a good system.

If you are going to have a more diversity of meals it goes without saying that you are going to need more ingredients.  You have accept that you are not going to neatly finish every opened packet with each meal and that these might sit around for a couple of weeks.

We have always had draw with spices in it. To be honest accept for a couple of items this was not heavily used, herbs and spices would be bought for a special weekend meal and then sit there for years, I do mean it years, which is not great for the flavour that next time you use them. Nothing ever ran out.

Since we started the system in 2020, that spice draw has seen regular and repeated action, we actually have to monitor it as we started running out of key spices. There are still a few random who provenance is not clear but nearly all is a healthy age.

They also stay in rough alphabetical order and have printed labels on the top of all the jars so we can easily find items, to cook and to check we have enough when shopping.

After a while we did end up with a couple full of packets of different rices (six at a high point), pasta and the new grains we had been investigated.  This was a real pain. So at point we had a make a significant investment in storage jars and cut down on the variant of rices we cooked. These are also all clearly labelled, sides and top. On these printed labels I have also included the serving weight and cooking time (since this was lost when taken out of the packets).

We also needed to find extra storage space of the spare packets before they go into the jars. We ended up putting unopened packets on the top of our kitchen cupboards.

We have extended the whole storage jar thing for nuts and dried fruit as well. That might have taken things too far.

Storage jars also helped with shopping as well as cooking.

Servings and measurements

This might be obvious, but one thing you need to pay attention to when using recipes is the number of servings. BBC Good Food and recipe books will tell you how many servings a recipe is for and you need to scale this up or down to match the number of servings you actually want.

We found we always wanted leftovers. This was great for lunches both before and especially during and post lockdown. Cooking for 4 servings for 3 would usually give us 2 lunch sized portions, though we have found something are #toogoodforleftovers.

It is also good to know what a good serving of carbs is for your family. Quite often recipes say serve with white rice but don’t tell you how much.  Or may tell you how much but these may not match your family needs.

You then need to invest it some good measures. Absolute musts are a small digital scale and some measuring spoons. I also struggle to live without measuring cups. I even have a travel set.

Glass leftover dishes

One issue with generating leftover is storing them efficiently in a fridge, especially when it is packed with a weeks worth of fresh shopping. Keeping half a pasta bake in the roasting tin is not going to work and also not a good use of cling film or foil.

We quickly adopted reused plastic takeaway curry containers. These were a perfect portion size and stack efficiently with no accidental contamination, well not from other foods.

I was concerned that we might not be doing the best thing re-using these takeway containers. Especially as the easy way to warm up a lunch was to pop the container straight from the fridge into the microwave.

So, Abigail for a birthday present bought me some glass containers the same shape and size as the plastic takeaway containers. These can still go straight from fridge to microwave (sans lid). Post lockdown these are not quite so good for popping into a work bag for a office lunch.

Notes

Recipes are not always right. Cooking instructions are simplified. Quantities can be wrong for your family. Ingredients can also not match your tastes.

As an example I believe you should never cook garlic for the same amount of time as onions. Countless recipes say chuck your garlic in with your onion, but this will generally just burn your garlic before your onion are nicely on the way to caramelised.

While we are on it, we as a family don’t do well with raw onion or garlic, so if a recipe has raw garlic I need to modify the recipe to cook the garlic (also without burning it).

Therefore while it is good to follow a recipe to achieve the effect and flavours the writer intended, you should not be afraid to do what you think is right.

One thing I’ve recently started to do is writing notes into my recipe books with my tweaks to make them work better for my family. Not so easy for BBC Good Food but in some cases I’ve started printing these out and sticking them in a binder.

Beyond the Spreadsheet

I’ve mentioned the need to go beyond the spreadsheet. At the start of 2022 I realised that I needed to make the shopping easier for Abigail and that a spreadsheet was not going to cut it and what I needed was a database, a database for the meal planning but one with the ingredients for all the recipes, all 200 of them.

So I’ve spent much of my spare time through the year moving the spreasheet to the Cloud and a variety of technologies.  To begin with this has required a combination of the spreadsheet to plan the meals and a database and a web page to generate a shopping list.

Now once I’ve finished planning the week and agreeing it makes sense, I don’t hand Abigail a meal plan, I hand her the shopping list. This is split between fresh ingredients we need to buy and the storecupboard items that need to be checked all automatically adjusted to match the number of servings we need. Making life a whole lot easier.

While I created the database and web pages just for me. I have now made it multi-user – as a beta service. So if you are interested you can create yourself and account and adopt the system.