Index Cards For Life

I have written elsewhere about my new chore card system, which has been so successful (at least, according to my rather modest standards) that I have looked for ways to incorporate more index cards into my life.

Well, okay, not really.

The chore card system is working fairly well, and in a random pragmatic convergence, index cards have made themselves part of my new meal planning system, too.

My old meal planning system was working just fine.

I had roughly two weeks' worth of general approaches to meals (meat and sides, fried rice with protein, pasta with tomato sauce, pasta with non-tomato sauce, Tex-Mex, etc.).  I plugged in whatever was on sale or whatever I had in the pantry to those basic approaches, and I had two weeks' worth of meals.

It got the job done, and if you need to get the job done, that's the simplest approach.  Ten to twelve flexible, customizable meals, over and over and over.

But I wanted to generate a little more variety and a little more buy-in from the rest of the fam, without sacrificing my control over the dietary and budgetary considerations.

So, I turned to index cards.

I got a 100-card rainbow pack.  That seemed like more than enough variety to me.

I figured that there were special dinners that we'd only have very occasionally because of either the cost or the time involved.  I wanted the guys to feel free to choose them, but I wanted there to be some limitations.

So I put meals like sushi, ribs, cioppino, cassoulet, and boeuf bourguignon on the purple cards.  Mostly, they just sit in the card box and don't even get looked at.  Birthdays, holidays, Grandmom's-coming-to-town, then we pull them out and say, "Let's pick a special dinner!"

I had eighty cards left, in four colors.

So I thought about what sorts of categories would force our diet and our budget in helpful directions.  The categories I came up with are specific to our needs and choices as a family, but they might give you a helpful idea of how to do the same with your own family's needs and choices.

I put all meat-and-sides meals on the pink cards.  (Pink, medium rare meat, it worked for me.)

I put all soups on the blue cards.  (Super-meat-heavy stews, I kept with the pink.  Soups with some meat in them, blue.)

I put all wheat-based vegetarian or very-low-meat meals on the green cards.  (Pasta, couscous, sandwiches, savory pies, etc.)

And I put wheat-free vegetarian meals on the yellow cards.

It really wasn't that hard to fill up all twenty cards in each category, although sometimes it was a matter of varying the details in the same basic plan for two or three cards.  (Veggie chili with cornbread, veggie chili with potatoes, you know the drill.)

Every Sunday night, I have us each pick a meal from one of the four "everyday" categories (Amos doesn't get to yet), and then I fill up the rest of the week's menu with what I need to make it work with our budget and diet.  (I try to use at least three yellow cards per week.)

Once a card has been picked, I pull it from the stack so it won't get chosen again in the near future.

When any one color runs out (usually yellow first, since I'm trying to pull from it most often), I put all the cards back in the stack, even if some colors still have many unchosen meals in them.

Each cycle lasts about a month and a half this way.  I suppose if you weren't pulling heavily from any one color, you could make the cycle last over two months.  But I didn't need that much variety in my life, and I really did want to keep either meat-and-sides or pasta-and-sauce meals from dominating.  (The one tends to take over when you're short on time or mental energy, the other when you're short on cash.)

I won't say the kids have all of a sudden developed a heretofore undiscovered passion for vegetarian chili.  But it has increased buy-in for the non-meat, non-pasta meals, and I've learned some things about my kids' preferences that I didn't really know when I was doing all the picking.  (Isaac loves polenta and really dislikes chicken.  Theo loves rice and prefers black beans to chickpeas.  Stephen . . . always goes along with his wife's crazy ideas, bless his heart.)

You could do this with a fifty-pack instead of a hundred-pack.  (That's still over a month of meals.)  You could do it with fewer colors or more colors.  You could have a much more elaborate version of this than I am capable of even thinking of, and you could probably glitz it up and make it Pinterest-worthy. 

I put the week's menu on a piece of notebook paper, and I put it on the fridge.  Nobody pins that on Pinterest.

But this is working for us.