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I don't have nearly the collection of many members, but I still have trouble decided what to make on a given night.  I want to use the cookbooks I have and I have marked many recipes to try or bookmarked them here "I want to make this".  Right now I kept out the books I received for Christmas and one of the kitchen calendars and planned out for 2 weeks our meals.  In the past I have tried picking a book for the week and trying recipes from that book all week, then moving on to a different book for the next week.  

How do other members plan out/ do they plan out their cooking?  

I agree fully with averythingcooks and employ many of those techniques.  I also keep a log of what we've made in the past in Excel and will search for the 5 star recipes to remind me what we loved.  Finally, have some basics when you get overwhelmed.  I felt that way yesterday and decided that we would have oven-baked chicken tonight and grilled steak tomorrow - each with basic, roasted vegetables.  Fast, easy, and we enjoy.  Sometimes the best recipe is just simply grilled or roasted food with some olive oil, salt and pepper.  

I don't plan ahead for everyday meals.  I usually know day before what I like to serve for next day and start searching for appropriate recipes using EYB, copymethat, pepperplate or my Japanese sites for my recipes.  Next morning I pull out what I need for dinner and or lunch and may start prepping ahead.  For example, tonight I knew I wanted to have seafood fedua and made crab stock ahead yesterday, pulled out fedeo, 3 types of seafood from pantry freezer this morning.  

It helps that I retired early and only cook for two  but with two very different taste preferences.   We do not eat out unless we are traveling preferring to eat all our meals home leisurely with drinks of our choice, no high taxes or tip.  We look forward to our dinnertime meals so I do my best to make it special for us.  

I have lots of books but my take is if it cost less than $20 per book (kindle) and I use at least one recipe from the book, it paid for itself because if we ate out we would be spending easy $80 including drinks for two.   And the service is not very good where we live because of high living cost and not enough workers. 

I'm totally in agreement with you Rinshin .. meals at home are special! EYB for me is a source of "So I've got red lentils...what shall we have for dinner?"...

I don't generally plan meals - I see what is available that looks fresh and tasty and then look for recipes to use it. There are exceptions such as when I try one recipe and then follow with a series of related recipes to see the range of variation that the recipe(s) support ... or when I buy pantry ingredients that I then need to find recipes to use up .... have any recipes requiring black garlic molassess?

Sometimes I am paralyzed by all the choices with all the cookbooks I have. I try to do as averythingcooks says, and narrow my focus to a couple of books. Also like comments by dekellie and rinshin.

So many recipes, so little time!

Yes, vickster, that is how I feel a lot of the time, so many choices and I just get overwhelmed.  I do employ some of the strategies the others mentioned, such as working from just a couple books for the week.  Looking at what needs to be used up and then planning around that using EYB.  I have also started marking recipes in EYB as "I want to cook that" and will then confine a search to that bookmark. 

During the week I work and spend time at yoga, so meals have to be quicker but I still want them to be quality as I usually only eat the one meal a day.  I cook for 3 in total, my self and 2 adult children.  We have some diverse preferences, or I should say my kids do :).  

Thanks for everyone's feed back.  I am still working on a system that will work for me.  I think I am settling into picking a book or 2 for a week and planning out the week's meals ahead.  This week I am using Half Baked Harvest: Super Simple and Diana Henry's From the Oven to the Table, both of them were Christmas gifts.

I like cooking recipes from lots of different culinary traditions but realized several years ago that odds and ends of various ingredients were piling up.  The freezer was my friend…until I couldn't find anything in it!  I’m usually cooking for just me and my husband, so less-used ingredients (e.g., a certain rather large bottle of orange blossom water, ahem) can take a while to use. I’m also trying to minimize how much food I waste.  So I started keep a running list of ingredients I need to focus on cooking through, in rough order of urgency/perishability (ASAP vs. soon vs. sometime), and usually pick recipes based on which ones help with “the list.”  EYB’s been a huge help, of course, for identifying recipes for specific ingredients.  By the time I sort through the various candidates to see which ones sound appetizing, match well with the time/skills/equipment I’ve got, and hopefully use multiple ingredients on “the list” vs. requiring purchase of another special ingredient that’ll take me a long time to use, the choices have usually narrowed down a lot.  And finding a good-sounding recipe for multiple ingredients on “the list” now feels like winning the lottery!  All of this gets temporarily set aside, however, if one of us is craving spaghetti for dinner or there’s a particular recipe I’m dying to try (usually from a new book I've just gotten).

What a fun question! I am a totally impulsive cook - I cook what I'm in the mood to eat (I might ask my husband for a suggestion, but will quickly dismiss it if it doesn't sound good to me!).  I really only cook from recipes at the weekends (we do meal kits 3 days a week), so will ask myself what I'm craving, come to this site and find recipes, go to the store and boom! Cook it!  During the week, I'll use non-meal kit days to eat leftovers or cook with leftover ingredients.  

We have 2062 cookbooks, 598 are not on EYB, many that are on EYB are not yet indexed. Years ago my husband, a librarian, started cataloguing all our books on LibraryThing, so we would stop buying duplicates and know where to find a specific book. We randomly select a book to randomly choose a recipe from, that my husband cooks, roughly once a week. He has a list of all of our pantry locations, which we randomly pick an ingredient that I will use that week. EYB helps immensely with that, as I now look at what recipes I already have that utilize that ingredient to find what I will be making. I also have used EYB to find out what I could do with an ingredient that smells or looks wonderful at the market. Often, in pulling these books from the shelves I find other recipes I want to make in the near future. We recently had our last child move out on their own, so I am trying to adjust to cooking for only two. I like soups or other dishes that could be one fresh meal and one left over meal. Recipes that make more than that are unlikely to be chosen by me, unless the kids are coming, as I am not fond of leftovers. I like it when I can half or quarter a recipe easily, which factors into what I choose to make. If a book is on EYB, I check to see if it has any reviews, which has meant not making something once because multiple people did not like it. I cook without a recipe 1-3 nights a week, as I have been cooking for almost 50 years. I adore cookbooks, as they keep me from getting bored with cooking. Some I have loved so much I have given copies as gifts. If I cook 5 recipes from a book and hate them all, the book gets given to my local Friends of the Library group for their sale. I try to plan out meals a day or two before market trips. Sometimes recipes look more exciting in the planning stage than in the time to cook stage, which has been an issue for me. I have also found that too much standing decreases my motivation to cook. I am in a learning process of how to better read recipes to select ones that I can more easily make. My husband hates when something goes bad before it is used, so I am trying to learn how to realistically buy what we will eat. Maybe in another decade or so I will have a foolproof method of menu planning, but I am not counting on it. I love hearing how others do it!

I do a mix of the suggestions here. I do have a very large collection - more than 2,500 books - so I agree it is overwhelming when I get hundreds of results from a recipe search. These are some of my ways to make what I choose to cook easier.

• EYB Cookbook Club - I find this has helped me focus on a book and cook a lot more out of it than I would otherwise. This month's book, Nothing Fancy by Alison Roman has been a wonderful book for me. Everything I have made has been fantastic.


• I am trying to work my way through my cookbooks, tagging recipes that appeal with the bookmark "I Want to Cook This". This helps me narrow down search results to recipes I have already identified as my kind of food. I have 366,000+ recipes on my Bookshelf (that includes magazines and some blogs) so there are many recipes in my collecton I know I will never cook.


• Sometimes I plan ahead and sometimes I'm using up whatever is in the fridge. EYB is invaluable for helping to use up ingredients. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to empty my freezer so I currently searching for recipes to help that.


• When my search results are huge, I sort by Buzz so I can see other members' ratings and read their Notes. That often helps me choose a recipe (or rule it out). I also read the Notes every day (to make any index corrections members have noted or add links) but I also then tag as "I Want to Cook This" any recipes that catch my eye.

I have that same New Year resolution Jane! I reckon I can eat for at least 6 weeks from the (now) 1/2 full freezer & store cupboard!

I am also trying to empty my freezer and cupboard, and trying not to be tempted by new ingredients when I shop other than fresh vegetables and fruits. I find EYB invaluable for using select ingredients that I want to use up. I also read the Notes every day, which constantly inspire me.

With posts about using up all those food......I have soooo much food everywhere.  Besides kitchen and pantry, small closet close to front door (coat closet) is full of Asian, ramen, noodle, sauces galore, Japanese, Mexican, and what I call canned delicacies to go with afternoon drinks on occasion. This closet is perfect because it keeps constant temperature so I store all my wines (most times like 80-100 bottles).  This closet also stores vacuum cleaner.

One bedroom closet besides my clothes hanging, the floor and top shelves have all my Japanese shelf stable food items.  This closet alone will keep us fed for at least 6-8 months.

I have refrigerator freezer and separate freezer in our utility room.  Totally packed to the brim.  My husband says I go daily freezer diving while he likes to dive in the ocean.   I got this DNA from my mother who was exactly like this.  

I struggled with this same thing for ages, but now I have my system down:

- When I get a new cookbook, I attach a piece of paper to the inside cover, on which I write all the recipes I want to try from it, divided into categories (mainly in terms of 'less than an hour' / 'more than an hour', since that defines whether I can make them on a weeknight after work or not) but also sometimes other categories as well eg 'breakfast' / 'sides' / 'desserts' etc.

- I then go to EatYourBooks and bookmark all those recipes with 'I want to make this'

- When I make a recipe, I tick it off on the paper with a brief note eg 'delicious', 'meh', 'not good' (to help future me remember whether it's worth making again), and also change the bookmark in EatYourBooks to 'I've made this' and/or 'Favourite recipes' and add some notes and maybe a photo.

- I plan all my cooking a week in advance. Once a week I sit down and plan out what I'm going to make on every night, based on some combination of a) wanting to cook from a particular cookbook or b) what I have in the freezer/fridge/pantry that needs using up (this is where EYB really comes into its own) and c) how much time I'll have on a given day. I do all the shopping based on those recipes I want to make, so I have everything for that week to hand.

In terms of deciding which books to use when you have so many: I recently decided that I would make three recipes from each of my existing cookbooks before moving onto new ones, which has worked out well and forced me to make some dishes that I would probably otherwise never have got round to.

Ro_ you are an inspiration to me!