Meal Planning

[JoMarie]

Does anyone meal plan? If so, can you please give me a few tips on how you do it?

[Sequoia]

I basically sit down before I do my shopping list. I see what I have in the fridge, freezer and cupboard and go from there. I have about 10 meals which are on high rotation (easy thing that take less than 20 mins to prepare) and I try to make a new dish every Monday night so we don't get bored. If it gets DH approval (he's very fussy! ) then I will make it again.

[Lucy]

Yep, I am a bit obsessive about my meal plans!

We have around 40 meals that get the DH tick of approval that get rotated over a month.

There are some standard faves that get repeated in a month (spag bol, cos we all love it)......

All I did was spreadsheet all of our tried and true fave meals, then classified them (ie fish, beef, lamb, veggo etc) , then re-sorted them over a months calendar, so we get a huge variety, but I know exactly what to shop for and what to cook for.

(It does sound obesssive, but otherwise I go barmy.........I started it when Lexie was first born.....it means we all get a great cooked meal, the pantry/freezer is alwasys stocked with what we need, shopping is easy, & it means we utilise seasonal veg properly, and it means I feel organised.......)

[Ella]

If Lucy is still on BB can you give us all some of your 40 meal ideas?

Or anyone else for that matter. Maybe if everyone sticks up all the recipes they put in their meal planner and we could swap recipes or something, I'm just new to meal planning so will need a bit of help getting started!

[PumpkinZulu]

I love meal planning...I'm doing it right now LOL. I usually only do a 7 day meal rotation as it's just DF and I, so we don't need to be TOO organised. This week looks something like this:

Monday (tonight) Lamb Tagine
Tuesday: Spicy sausage and goat's cheese with fettucine
Wednesday: Beef Stroganof
Thursday: Haven't decided yet, some variation of lamb chops
Friday: Takeout, woohoo
Saturday: Home-made pizza night, probably a salmon, caper, marscepone pizza, a zucchini and sundried tomato and a mediterainian lamb and rockette. Nom.
Sunday: Pfft, whatever. Feeling lazy. Thai chicken and noodle salad probably.

I usually just look at what we have in the pantry and base it off of that. Atm I'm cooking our meals at my mums house because she's overseas and my 18 yo brother wont feed himself if I don't cook DF and I usually buy meat in a fortnightly or monthly shop in bulk from the market and freeze into portions (for example, if mince is on special in bulk, we'll get it and divide it into 1 meal portions and freeze in bags). We keep the pantry items updated regularly and constantly add to what we have so that we have a broad range of things. We tend not to buy greens etc in a weekly shop, we usually pick up one or two nights worth of fresh ingredients on the day we need them as we have Footscray market right on the way home, and I've found with the way I plan our meals it works out cheaper to simply pick up (for example) two carrots and a lime than buy a big bag of carrots, because they'd probably not get used as well itms?

I also use my weekends to bake brownies, cakes, biccies etc so that we have something for desert or something to nom on whenever we want...either that or a self-saucing pud is easy to knock up after dinner.

[Nicambhar]

OMG, Lucy, you are a super mum. My DP laughed at me when I said I was going do up a meal plan. I have also considered shopping online to save me impulse buying. He just absolutely cracked up laughing over the online shopping and said that I was just being lazy.
You know what, you have inspired me. I am going to prove him wrong.

[JoMarie]

I have shopped online! I did it a couple of weeks ago and I love it! I HATE grocery shopping and I had a particularly bad week, so I just did it all online and it was delivered the next day. I can highly recommend EzyShop in WA. Really fresh fruit and veges and the meat was good too. It was a little more expensive than going to Woolies, but so convenient! And I didn't have to do it with a crying baby!

Lucy - you are amazing! So organised. I hope I would be able to organise myself that well. I will give it a try! We seem to be living on spag bol and lasagne at the moment, with the exception of a curry that I have just tried in the slow cooker!

[Mother Goose]

I am fanatical about meal planning! I believe it makes me a more efficient shopper! I go as far as to plan lunches as well - otherwise DH buys lunch... I've also done online shopping and found it a blessing - totally avoids impulse buys! Only downside is I find it more expensive...

[Nicambhar]

You know what, even though my 3 children aren't as time consuming because they are older, I am still going to give the online shopping thing a go. DP will never know how the groceries are bought anyway and never has paid attention to it either. It was only that I brought it up about o/s that he said I was being lazy. Besides, another thing that I think is good, I won't get all those scratches and dents on my car from careless people at the car park..

[visitor2]

Jo thanks for the tip on EzyShop I'm off to check it out now

Lucy can you fly over and sort me out i am hopeless at the moment with sorting things out for meal times. I'm going to try and do a meal plan for the next two weeks.

[BellyBelly]

BellyBelly has a meal planner sheet which you can download (was going to include it in the next update but since you are talking about it LOL). You can print this and stick it on your fridge.

https://www.bellybelly.com.au/downlo...al-planner.pdf

If you have any suggestions on what can be added let me know. Playing with a few ideas at the moment.

[MistyFying]

oooh looks good... off to have a play

[visitor2]

Kelly that looks great.

[BellyBelly]

Hehehe thanks hon I put it together after seeing a few different things I liked - wanted to add more but couldn't fit it all into an A4 page... have some ideas....

[BellyBelly]

I've updated the meal planner, let me know if you think its better now. Any suggestions you might have are good Let me know your general thoughts of it too.

[jakspak]

thanks for this now i just have to get ink and paper for my printer lol. i so want to get back into this its just working it out on my budget what i need are meal idea's ones that use every day stuff that that is cheap to get hold of if you get what i mean like not a huge amount of spices that i will only use for that one meal and probably havnt heard of lol i realise my initual shop to get everything on the list would be high then i want the top ups etc and usual weekly top up to be not so high im on a tight tight budget at the mo which is soon to ease in the next 8-10 weeks so am looking at having it organised by then and ready to get up and going if not sooner. thanks

[Roryrory]

When I am super organised I have a planner that has the days of the week in the left hand column and across the top it has "lunch", "dinner" and "prepare". DH and I aways have a planned cooked lunch (we are not big bread eaters so sambos are out) and the "prepare" colum is for stuff like "take meat out of freezer" or "buy fresh herbs on way home" - things I can do today that make tomorrow easier.

I have a huge amount of cookbooks so I am constantly scourng for new meal ideas.

Lately I have beem playing around with Recipie Centre 5.0, a free program you can doown load that saves recipies and lets you create shopping lists and meal plans AND TALLIES UP THE INGREDIENTS AS YOU GO! Lucy this would be perfect for you cause if you need say 500g mince for Wednesday's spag bol and 500g mince for Friday's meatloaf, it automatically tells you (in your shopping list) that you need I kig of mince IYKWIM.

I have over stocked my pantry ATM so am trying to povvo-feed us right now, but once I am cleared out I will get Recipie Centre going in full swing.

[kimashswan]

Just found an awesome site to help with inspiration as to what to put onto the meal plan.
mealsforyou dot com, then click on Handy meal Collections on the left. Yum.