Step #3: Applying Menu Planning Ideas (Page 3)

•  c) Acid or tart foods are often served as accompaniments to fatty foods, because they help cut the fatty taste. This is why applesauce and port, mint sauce and lamb, or orange sauce and duckling are such classic combinations.

2) Textures: Texture applies to the softness or firmness of foods, their feel in the mouth, whether or not they are served with sauces, and so on. Don’t repeat foods with the same or similar texture. For example:

• a) Prepare a clear soup instead of a thick soup if you serve the main course with a cream sauce. On the other hand, a cream soup goes well before a simple sautéed or broiled item.
• b) Don’t serve too many mashed or pureed foods, unless you are serving babies.
• c) Don’t serve too many heavy, starchy items.

3) Appearance: Serve foods with a variety of colors and shapes. Colorful vegetables are especially valuable for livening up the appearance of meats, poultry, fish, and starches, which tend to be mostly white or brown.

There are so many possible combinations of foods that it is impossible to give rules that will cover all of them. Besides, creative home cooks are continually experimenting with new combination, breaking old rules, and coming up with exciting menus.

Availability of Foods

Use fresh foods in season. Foods out of season are more expensive, often lower in quality, and their supply is undependable. Don’t put asparagus on the menu if you can’t get good asparagus.

Use foods locally available. Fresh seafood is the most obvious example of a food that is hard to get in some parts of the country, unless you are willing to pay premium prices.

Complete Utilization of Foods

You can’t afford to throw food away, any more than you can afford to throw money away. You must plan total utilization of foods into the menus. Whether or not this is done can make or break a household budget.

1) Use all edible trim.

Unless you use only portion control meats, poultry, and fish and only frozen and canned vegetables, you will have edible trim. You can either throw it away or call it a loss. You can use it and same money.

Plan recipes that utilize these trimmings and use them. For example:

• a) Use small meat scrapes for soups, chopped meat, pates, creamed dishes, and croquettes.
• b) Use larger meat trimmings for soups, stews, and braised items.
• c) Use bones for stocks and soups.
• d) Use vegetable trimmings for purees, soups, stews, stocks, filling for omelets and crepes.
• e) Use day-old breads for stuffing’s, breading, French toast, croutons, and meat extender.

2) Plan to avoid leftovers.

The best way to use up leftovers is not to create them in the first place. Handling food twice – once as a fresh item and one as a leftover – is more expensive and time consuming than handling it once, and it almost always results in loss of quality.

3) Plan for use of leftovers.

Careful planning of cooking can keep leftovers to a minimum. But some leftovers are almost inevitable, and it’s better for your costs to use them than to throw them out. You should have a recipe ready that will use it.

For example, if you serve roast chicken for dinner one day, you might plan on chicken à la king or chicken salad later that week. Remember to handle all leftovers according to proper sanitary procedures.

4) Avoid “minimum-use” perishable ingredients.

“Minimum-use” ingredients are those that you only use in one or two items. For example, you used fresh mushrooms for chicken breast served with mushrooms but not in any other item that week. When the ingredient is perishable, the result is a high percentage of spoilage or waste.

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