Spreadsheet

And so it begins...

Actually, it began last weekend, when Angela and I went over to my parents' house for dinner. (They made steak. It was good.) After dinner, my mother and I sat down and hashed out a menu for Thanksgiving. There was some negotiation involved. For some reason, she was adamantly against the idea of soup.

I don't know why. She loves soup.

Today, though, I need to make up a shopping list. When you are dealing with multiple dishes that share some of the same ingredients, this can be tricky. How many pecans do we need? There will be some in the salad, some in the stuffing (dressing, actually, but I find that word ambiguous), and maybe a pie... (Dessert is still vague.)

My solution? Overkill.

I fired up a spreadsheet. The first column became the shopping list. Other columns were each assigned to a dish. Rows got unique ingredients. These get totaled up in the first column. Ingredients in my pantry get gray backgrounds. I won't buy those, but I want to make sure that they are on the list so that I don't forget about them.

A printout of this becomes a useful cheat sheet while cooking so that I don't repeat that thing from a couple years ago when I forgot to put eggs in the stuffing.

If you have multiple people cooking and/or shopping, you can put your spreadsheet up on Google Docs, assigning each person a unique background color or something.

Alternately, you could just laugh at me.