Analyzing meal planning

I keep my weekly meal plans in a cheap spiral notebook, with a week on each page. It's not at all high tech, nor is it particularly beautiful, but it works. This also means that when I reach the end of a notebook, I have quite a few weeks of meal records at my fingertips. When I planned this week's meals yesterday, I realized that I was at the end of the notebook and I was curious about numbers. I've always said that I don't repeat the same meal in a month, but was that really true? I decided to look.

Here's how it worked out. 

I had 41 weeks of meals in the this particular notebook, giving me about ten full months of meals. It seemed like a pretty decent set of data. The most frequently made meal was spaghetti, coming in at nine times in those ten months, which is just about once a month. This was spaghetti with red sauce, but it would vary between ground beef or meatballs or Italian sausage (and once there were mussels). It kind of depended on what I felt like adding to the sauce when I made it. The second-most frequently made meal was tacos at six times in ten months. This didn't surprise me as it is a meal that everyone likes and is easy to make. I was actually surprised it didn't show up more. The rest of the repeated meals, which numbered between 20 and 40 (I gave up counting that exactly) tended to be repeated 2 - 4 times, with two being far more common than three or four. Finally, out of the possibility of ~287 meals for those ten months, there were 56 unique recipes. Some of them I was kind of surprised to find I only made once because in my head they are part of our usual rotation. I guess "rotation" is a much longer period of time than I realized. 

Other numbers:

Vegetarian - 46

Soup - 19

Asian (including Indian) - 45

Mexican - 16

Middle Eastern - 6

Fish - 8

So I am correct that we tend to eat a different meal each day of the month, and why when a child asks for a particular food I will sometimes say no because we just had it. "Just" actually means we ate it in the last several weeks. This also might explain why my children have tended to find college cafeteria food a bit repetitive. 

It's kind of interesting going back through the notebook, if only to remind myself of the different meals I've made. I tend to get in ruts (though I realize the numbers don't really bear this out) cycling through the same recipes. As I was looking through the lists, I kept thinking, "Oh, I like that. We haven't had that in a while." Usually I just recycle the notebooks when they're filled, but maybe I'll keep the next couple just for reference when I can't think of a single thing to make.