I've taken our Airtable meal plan to the next level with an inventory table. I did a full inventory and reorg of our upright freezer (long overdue). I'd love to do the same with our fridge and pantry, but it's hard to find the time, so I'm settling for adding things as we put them away or as I notice them. When I make the meal plan on Sunday night, I put "leftovers or ordering in" instead of a specific food, and list some inventory options. When I make the associated cooking plan, I note which inventory ingredients go into whatever we're cooking and build a shopping list for whatever we don't have in inventory. Then even less thought is required during the week.

Of course, this only works if the inventory is up to date, but I'm doing all right on that front so far. And if I go a week or two without updating it, it's still pretty easy to catch up.

Knowing what we have makes me much more eager to use it, especially now that I'm adding perishables. This week we need to use up the meat from a rotisserie chicken, so for Tuesday lunch I'll put it on a frozen pizza crust—bonus, I'll use up the open jar of tomato sauce before it goes fuzzy—and Tuesday dinner can be pasta with the rest of the chicken and whatever's in the open container of pesto. Iron Chef My Fridge is fun!

We probably won't do any bulk cooking next weekend because X and J will be recovering from their second vaccine shots, so the following week we'll be very glad to be well stocked and well organized. After their first shots we did a whole week of not cooking and mostly eating from the fridge and freezer, and by the end of it we gave up and ordered in just to taste something freshly made; it was very satisfying to clear out so many things, though.

My other food-related project is slowly moving all of our recipes into Whisk, which will build a grocery list for a given meal plan and also do nutritional assessments. I'm still happy with Airtable for the nitty-gritty of meal planning, but Whisk is aces for recipe organization.

On a meta level, it feels really good to have the mental wherewithal for this. Even a couple of months ago, there's no way I could have managed it.