Now we are going to get down to some serious work with our cooking club. The next step, and perhaps the most important, is menu planning.

So how do you plan a menu when you are cooking as a group? There are actually a few ways you can handle this depending on how your cooking club plans to operate.

Here are a few ideas for different scenarios:

• The group members can rotate the menu planning. The designated planner for the week or month will choose all the meals and plan accordingly.
• The group members can each be assigned an equal number of meals to plan for each cooking session. Say there are 3 members in your group and you are cooking for a week at a time. One member will plan 3 of the meals and the remaining members will each plan 2.
• One member can plan the main dishes and the remaining members can choose the side dishes and any extras.
• If your group is going to prepare meals for different times of day, each member can take one mealtime. So, one member will plan the breakfasts, another lunch or baked goods, and the third will plan dinner.

Some ideas to keep in mind:

• Most of the meals you are preparing will need to be freezer safe.
• When you buy food in bulk, you need to prepare ahead. Chances are there will be leftover ingredients when you are done cooking. Decide as a group what you will do with any leftovers. You can donate them to a neighbor, rotate who keeps leftovers, or divide them up among members. Make sure you have adequate storage space and storage containers.

I am still putting the finishing touches on the downloadable menu planning worksheets, so I will share that as soon as I am finished.

Tomorrow I’ll share the menu used by my cooking club during our cooking day last month.

If you’ve missed any of the previous posts in this series, you can find them here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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