Meal Planning

Perhaps we can learn from each other in this area. How do people approach planning primal meals and/or menus?

Do you start with your targets and choose foods to fit?
Or start with the foods and combine them into meals?
Or some other approach entirely?

What works the best for you?

Now that I think about it, I start with food and work it into meals. Usually I start with some sort of meat - cook a good amount and then serve it up different ways. And I always do best when I actually plan! Planning is key to my success.

I do all of the weekday cooking in our family. My hubby does all of the weekend cooking. We both like to cook and this works in the scheduling of our family.

During the week I tend to make larger batches of meat so I can incorporate the left overs into a dish for the next day. We also eat salad nearly every night (and most lunches). So for us there is always a meat and always a salad and then whatever else we need to complete a dish. It makes meal planning pretty easy.

I also batch cook once a month so I have complete meals ready in the freezer. This helps on the days that I don't have time or don't feel like cooking.

Now, the weekends are planned out on Fridays. We typically make really gourmet meals on the weekends that take a long time to make. And Sunday night I always plan to have something left over for Monday as Mondays are our family's crazy night and the only night we don't eat dinner together.

I do once a month meals. I cook and/or prep about 12 meals once a month. Usually this lasts 2-3 months with leftovers and fresh cooking.

I'm kind of sporadic. Since generally it's just me I'm cooking for, just about anything I do turns into a batch. I will freeze in individual serving to use when I just don't feel like it. Then sometimes, nothing appeals and I punt, maybe make eggs or a salad. I do much better when planning, which I find much easier when DD is home. Cooking for one I find boring a lot.

Whenever we stumble on a recipe we really, really like (no matter how simple), we write it down.
For awhile we kept a list of our favorite foods and food combos (eggs and bacon, salad and soup, etc.) for quick reference but this doesn't seem necessary (as much) anymore!
If room is available, we've found it really helpful to stock up on any canned or dry goods and condiments, and keep that stock going. We stock up on frozen vegetables of all kinds, meats of all kinds, we freeze butter, etc. and keep that stock going by keeping a separate list of "stock up items" that we jot down if we find we're down to one or two of these items.
This way, the normal trip to the market is usually for produce only and there's no mad dashes when we realize we're out of this or that, and no pissed off realization that we forgot the "one thing" we went to the store for in the first place =D