Visual Meal Planning

I have a hard time using menu planners. I want to create meals that reuse primary ingredients, and I want to be able to visualize what those are. It's not easy to do in any list. In my day job, I visualize relationships a lot, and I thought that would be a good way to visualize meal plans: Use dishes as nodes in a graph (not a chart-type graph, but a collection of relationships), and connect them with the ingredients that they share. I love it! It's an easy way for me to see what ingredients can be reused and cut down on waste. Here's an example:

Each circle is a main dish, and I can see where dishes share common ingredients. In this case. Pesto Chicken Penne, Chicken Tacos, and Chicken Pot Pies all use cooked chicken- so I can make and shred enough chicken for all three meals in the beginning of the week, and make sure I have the rest of the ingredients on my shopping list.

Additionally, if I make a big batch of home-made pesto, I can use it for sandwiches on another day. Another benefit of this visual meal planning method is that it doesn't matter which order we have the meals in; that's one of the drawbacks of meal plans that stick to days of the week; they NEVER work out the way you plan them. This way I don't feel as if I'm getting completely sidetracked if we decide to order out one night instead of cook (or we are just both exhausted and have cereal for dinner instead).

Try out this method and let me know what you think! If you want to use the specific plans that I have created, I have them available for $1 on my Etsy site.