Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Crunching the numbers, 2021/22 edition

I've been using a weekly menu for many years and recording meals I've cooked in an Excel spreadsheet since 2009. (Nerds! I know.) Every year, on the arbitrarily chosen 20 April, I crunch the numbers and analyse what we ate. Admittedly, the menu has featured a lot of comfort food over the past three years. Partly due to the pandemic and partly because since I've had a garden to potter in, cooking has fallen down in my list of priorities and interests. Ah, well. Here's what we ate most over the past year:

vege burger wraps (18 times)
pasta and sauce (18 times)
oven-fried fish with veges (15 times)
roast pork and veges (14 times)
creamy tuna pasta (12 times)
pulled pork and coleslaw burgers (11 times)
macaroni cheese (9 times)
Greek meatballs and Greek salad (8 times)
leek, potato, bacon, bean and cream soup (8 times)
vegetable samosas (8 times)

I did try a few new recipes over the year, for example:

potato latkes
Keralan fried cauliflower
French goat cheese salad

and have managed to produce a variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs in the garden.

Not making any rash promises about diversifying ... but we have been eating more vegetarian (or vegan) meals than non-veg ones for a while now, and I'm keen to continue that trend.

3 comments:

Jess64 said...

Would you be willingly to share a draft or template of your excel spreadsheet. I would be interested in how you use it to get your numbers.

Karin said...

No need for a template … it's super simple. I write the years across the tops of the columns, and the dish names (in alphabetical order) down the left hand side of the rows, then increment the appropriate cell by 1 each time I cook something. I use the search function in Excel to find things (if I forget how I listed them) and, at the end of the year, sort the current year's column from highest to lowest numbers to see what we ate most. Enjoy ;-)

Jess64 said...

Thank you that is really interesting.