Each week, I write a menu plan for the week ahead. I've been doing it for years now. I can't even remember why I started doing it.

It could've been frustration at having a house full of food yet missing the vital ingredient for every meal I wanted to cook. Or frustration at spending a fortune on food and then ending up throwing loads of it away. Or (and this is probably the most likely) because my mother also does it.

Each week I write down a list of meals for the following week. I write the list on the backs of old Christmas and birthday cards (recycling!) and then go shopping for all of the ingredients for those meals. I am slightly flexible - often switching days, or dropping one meal altogether in favour of takeaway - but in general we pretty much eat what I've planned.

Visitors have seen my menu plans stuck to the fridge and commented on them on several occasions. Usually along the lines of "*cough* psycho *cough*"... Somebody once mentioned that I should start keeping all the old ones, and that seemed like a good plan, so I started chucking them in a shoebox in the cupboard.

This week we were having falafel with homemade tomato sauce. I couldn't remember what else we usually had with that meal, so I got the box out of the cupboard to find an old menu, confident that it would be there somewhere.

Even I was shocked to discover how many of these bits of cardboard were in the shoebox. This is maybe about half of them:



Here is a larger version.

I'm starting to think that maybe the *cough* psycho *cough* comments weren't so far from the truth after all...