Building a Food and Nonfood Supply and Planning a Dinner Menu

The best way to begin adding to your food storage is to buy one or two extra cans, bags, or bottles of something that you are getting at the store when you go shopping.  When you feel that your cupboards are getting full take time to inventory what you have.  Focus on food first, then get paper goods, personal products, and cleaning supplies.
In no time you will have a good stock of supplies.  Work your way up to a years supply if possible or at least to a level that will make you feel secure.
To figure out how much laundry soap I needed for a year, I took a maker and wrote the date I opened the package on it and when I finished it I wrote the date again.  When I had some free time I transferred those dates to a notebook.  I did this type of thing with everything you use.

Here are two ways to begin planning a menu:
This is what I did:
I wrote down everything that I could think of that I liked to eat for dinner.  Next I asked my family members to tell me their favorite dinners.  I used that list of favorites to make my menu calendar.
Here is Linda's suggestion:
Write on your calendar each night what you fix for dinner and at the end of the month you will have a month worth of menus.

I started my menu list about 20 years ago.  I keep it next to my cookbooks with my old and new menu calendars.  I add to this list when I find really good new recipes.  A couple of years ago I rewrote my list, because the old one was looking worn out.  I save my menus for several years.  Some months I copy the previous year's same month almost exactly.  Sometimes they are just fun to look at and see how our food likes have changed.

About the third week of each month I plan the next months menu.  I only go grocery shopping every other week at the most.  Some months I don't go at all.
I plan my menu to use the things that will perish quickly first.  It took me a while to figure this out.  I found in the beginning I was switching menus to different days often, because something was not going to last until the day I had planned to use it.
I don't plan breakfast and lunch.  We have a small list of things we eat.  Those items are almost always on hand.