For the last few months my wife and I have tried to put together a dinner menu for the entire month, in advance. Sounds crazy, right? The reason for doing this is three-fold: We eat healthier overall, because we plan fruits and vegetables on a regular basis instead of haphazardly having whatever sounds like it will go well; we get an entire month's shopping done in one day (except for additional milk, eggs, and bread that we sometimes pick up on our way home from work), instead of going "big" shopping every other week; and we save money, because we only buy the food that we know we will be eating, instead of stocking up on 6 boxes of fish-sticks because they are on sale. The process goes something like this:

• Pull out the list of dishes that we can make and eat frequently. This generally has about 15-20 dishes. It also has a column of our favorite side dishes (pasta, rice, crescent rolls, etc), and a column with fruits and veggies that meet with our picky approval.
• Check our social calendar for nights we know we will be out, or will want something easy (order pizza when we're hosting poker night), and fill those blocks in first.
• Then fill weeknights with easier meals, because nobody wants to come home from work and spend 4 hours over the stove. All the while, be sure not to schedule two chicken dishes near each other, and the same for beef, pork, pasta, etcetera.
• Fill in the weekends with whatever meals are left over – generally something more elegant or labor intensive.
• And finally, go back and match up side dishes and fruits & veggies to meals they would go well with.

After spending 4+ months doing this manually, we've become tired of the process. And so, this has been a very round-a-bout way of announcing that I will be writing a tool to do this for us. So far it's working title is "CFMenuCal" – though that's the second name I came up with, and I had already submitted the project to RIAForge. Hopefully I can change the project name once it's been approved. The original name was "CFEventCalendar" but once I started writing this post and thinking about how I was going to implement it, I realized how specialized it will need to be and thought that I had better go ahead and gear it towards creating menus from the beginning – not just as one use for it.