Creating healthy meal plans
 

How do you guys create your meal plans?

What I want to do is create a set of 20 or so meals for each of the daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) that I can fix relatively easily and that are mostly healthy, and have them be in a sense 'interchangeable'. That way when I go to do meal plans, I'd be able to pick from something in the '400 Cal lunch' pile without too much thought and effort, and I can adjust recipes to seasonal ingredients and add new ones as I come across them.

What I'm not sure about is how to actually *do* that. Excel? Word? Notebook paper and a pen and a really big binder? Have any of you done something similar to this?

I've tried using online meal plan generators, and I find them to have really bizarre combinations of foods (like fat free cream cheese spread over half a grapefruit... I like both of those things, but just the logistics of getting the cream cheese *on* the grapefruit seems ridiculous), and a lot of unnecessarily expensive and/or out of season ingredients (like fresh figs, which are delicious but impossible to get here). So I figure doing my own is probably my best bet.

not a clue how to help, but that's a great idea!

I've done something like that a while back using index cards. I had the menu on the front of the card and the ingredients on the back. I think I had the ingredients separated into staples (things I was highly likely to have on hand) and items I would most likely have to purchase. I also had some key preparation hints and a reference to any recipes. So for example for baked Parmesan chicken I would include the temperature and amount of time to bake it and a note that the recipe is in the blue notebook or a specific cookbook name and page.

Then instead of writing out a menu for the week, you can just stack the index cards you're going to use in the order of the meals after you've written out your shopping list from the back of the cards, checking of course to see if you're nearly out of any of the staple items.