Cooperative Menu Planning

I'm not actually dead, just been quite busy lately. Holidays, work, preparing for other holidays, etc has taken a lot of time. This rash of busyness has led to lazy cooking, and a brainstorm.

I'm not sure how this would work, but I've been tossing the idea around in my head. I know we eat out way too much, and part of that is due to a combination of lazy menu planning, and good menu planning just being plain difficult. After awhile, we lose a lot of variety because we get tired of thinking of new ideas and start relying on pasta with tomato sauce and other boring staples again. So, I've been trying to think of ways to reduce the work load of menu planning and increase the variety. My latest brainstorm would be cooperative menu planning.

In my mind, small groups of people with similar tastes in food could split up the burden of menu planning.

One way might be to split the week into 7 days (inventive, that) and have each person plan a few meals. All 7 days worth of menus/recipes could be posted, along with a grocery list and all participants could make the meals in any order they wanted.

It seems like that wouldn't work very long, however. It's complicated, and reliant on everyone participating fully all the time. Not to mention that it would probably result in a lot of over-buying of food since the meals wouldn't be very well coordinated with each other. One of the most difficult parts of menu planning for me is coming up with ways to use ALL of ingredients we buy for one recipe, or ways to re-use leftovers so that they don't get boring.

So the next idea I had was to start a collaborative collection of menu blocks. There are tons of cookbooks and online recipe collections out there, but they're all single recipes. There are leftovers. There are foods that you have to buy in larger quantities than the recipe calls for, so there are leftover raw ingredients, too.

The idea behind menu blocks would be that people could submit a collection of 2 or 3 meals that are closely related. For example, a menu for dinner one night plus a menu that uses up the leftovers for lunch the next day. Or a menu for dinner plus a menu for another dinner that uses up the raw ingredients not needed the first night.

So, if you need to buy packages of celery and carrots for soup but only need two of each, the coordinating menu would somehow incorporate the leftovers so they don't go rancid in the fridge before you think of a way to use them. Perhaps lunch the next day consists of hummus and raw veggies. Or, make curry for dinner one night and then use the leftovers as filling for steam buns so they'll be more portable and a different meal the next day. The two meals coordinate, the raw or cooked leftovers are used up, but you don't have to eat the same thing 2 or 3 days in a row to use them all up.

This is, of course, the whole idea behind menu planning, but I find it tiresome and frustrating to sit down and try to find 1-2 weeks worth of menus that work together this way. So if there was a repository of blocks already set up like this, you could just go through tetris-like and fill your weekly meal plan with pre-coordinated meals instead of finding one meal, then needing to search for a coordinating meal, and doing that over and over again until the week was full.

A single person could certainly set out to do this alone and keep a personal collection, but with collaborative input you'd see more variety and different ways of combining meals. Plus, with multiple people working on something like this you'd get a much bigger collection of options in less time than you would with only one person. We could sort them by type (dinner+lunch, lunch+lunch, breakfast+lunch, etc...) so that it would be easier to find the "right pieces" to snap together to create a full weeks worth of menus.

Does this make sense? Is it interesting? Would anyone use something like this? Is it feasible?