027: Menu Curating

and a recipe for homemade coffee liqueur

Oct 20, 2023

Hello! Welcome back to another week of Ceremonial. I’m so glad you’re here.

Today I thought I’d share my methods for meal planning: a topic fully divided. You either have the personality type that loves to meal plan or you don’t. I love it, are you shocked? All I have to do is call it “menu curating” and suddenly it goes from a housekeeping task to a creative endeavor. But we’ll talk all about it below.

First, a quick recipe for Homemade Coffee Liqueur.

Homemade Coffee Liqueur

You know the drill, I love homemade. I found out while chatting with a Whole Foods employee last year that any type of coffee liqueur you buy off the shelf uses ingredients that don’t pass their standards (usually meaning dyes, high fructose corn syrup etc.). They don’t carry it. And seeing that my standards are even higher than Jeff Bezos’s, I decided to try making my own. Using just three pantry staples, about half a bottle of rum, and the simple technique of pouring, shaking, and waiting, this liqueur comes together effortlessly — perfect for another fall/winter full of espresso martinis.

Homemade Coffee Liqueur

47.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

How to curate your weekly menu:

Okay, I too went through the phase of showing up to the grocery store with no list and coming home from work without a clue of what’s happening for dinner, but that time was short lived. It led to a lot of wasted food, nights of takeout, even spats at home over the impossible question of “what do you want for dinner?”. I’ve decided, instead, to loosely live by a schedule that suits my needs and I’m here to share it with you.

I’ll start by giving this rough guideline of how I view days and meals, how to cover lunches, things like that. I usually go really simple for weekday breakfasts (yogurt, granola, toast) so I don’t include that below. This is a plan for two people who prefer to spend money on good-for-you foods instead of going out. So it IS a lot of eating at home.

I *try* to sit down on Sundays to go through my plans for the week. Once I know what nights we’ll be out, how many lunches/dinners we need, what fresh herbs/veggies I have to use up first, what I grabbed from the farmers market, then I’ll go hard on planning how to use it all for the week to come.

So, of course you can swap the days around or do your own thing. I just find it so much easier to filter recipes through this lens. Just make sure you’re

checking your calendar to see what flows for you — what days are your busiest?
being reasonable with how much time you have and how many nights you can actually commit to cooking — you don’t want to end up wasting food
taking note of what’s in season — but you can just follow along with me for that one
having fun — don’t take things too seriously and enjoy time in the kitchen