Restaurant Secrets - Menu Planning - as part of the food and kitchen series by GeoBeats.

Hey everybody. My name is Chef Matt, founder and CEO of Modern Art Catering. Today, I am going to share some restaurant secrets on how we save money and time through extensive planning our menus for the week. I know we do at restaurants because we are serving three hundred people a night. But you can do it at home just the same. When we talk about planning, what I mean is sitting down one day probably Sunday before the week starts and coming up with a menu for the next five days, shopping for that menu and knowing exactly what you are going to do each night. It helps you save money because you can buy things in bulk and cook things all at once that can stretch out through the week. It helps you save time because you only have to take one market trip and you can have all your stuff ready whenever you need to cook. It is also a lot more fun because you can tell your kids what you are making and anticipate their needs so everyone can look forward to a Wednesday night pasta dinner or a Thursday night chicken dinner.

By understanding what is in your fridge, understanding the menus that you are going to create and using what you already have to come up with the menus for the next week. Knowing that a potato sack can last a few weeks, so if you have got potatoes in your refrigerator use those potatoes next week. If you got some chicken left over from a dish recreate it into a chicken salad or into a pasta salad or into a macaroni and cheese. Same thing with pasta, if you are going to make pasta twice in a week you can boil it all at once, add a little bit of olive oil and put it in your fridge so it would not stick together and when you need to use it all you have to do is heat it up add a new sauce and bam you have a whole new dish.