Who wants to help with my meal plan system? (Please!)

[Rhubarbara]

I'm not a great or very enthusiastic cook but I live in a country where there aren't many ready meal options and I want my children to eat well, so I do cook a lot. But because I'm chaotic and a procrastinator, I end up doing everything last minute and being stressed, and I seem to spend so much time THINKING about it. So I want to get organised. And I don't want to be starting from scratch every day. I don't have massive amounts of freezer space so can do a bit of bulk cooking, but not much.

I'm also a freelancer so I can organise my time as I like, and dcs are at school, so come home around 4. I have loads of projects at the moment and I'd like some days in the week when I can free my mind of household/cooking stuff and just concentrate on work.

So I'm trying to set up a system that would allow me to put most of the effort in on Monday so that the rest of the week I can mostly reheat, or rustle something up very quickly. Something like this:

Monday - Cooking day. Cook/prepare dinner that will ideally generate leftovers for Tuesday and/or for snackboxes. Also make lunchbox snacks. Prepare salad/veg for rest of week.
Tuesday - Leftovers
Wednesday - DH out in the evening. Super quick/easy supper (pasta, eggs).
Thursday - Chicken (bc this is when my local supermarket gets its chicken delivery)
Friday - Not sure. Pizza or some sort of one-pot so we have leftovers at the weekend - I could cook this on Monday too and freeze. Quite often it's just the dcs eating on a Friday as dh and I go out.

For example:

Week 1
M - Big batch of bolognese, half in freezer. Spag bol for dinner. Banana bread (for snacks, frozen in slices)
T - Cottage pie (using bolognese)
W - Bubble and squeak (using leftover mash)
Th - Lemony chicken and rice
F - Pizza

Week 2
M - Quiche x 2 (leftovers for snackboxes) and salad, vegetable chilli (freeze for Friday/weekend)
T - Veg chili and rice
W - Scrambled eggs and salad
Th - Chicken nuggets w. veg
Fr - Easy pasta eg lemon cream sauce or pesto

Any thoughts? I like the idea in principle but can't help feeling it's not quite there yet. Anyone who can help me make this more efficient, I'd be very grateful for your ideas! Basically I want to do the most work on Monday to make the rest of the week a no-brainer ;-)

[Wildernesstips]

Do you have a slow cooker that can be doing some of the work for you?

I try to do something similar but I'm not so restricted on freezer space. If I know my working week is going to be manic, I will prep a meal in the slow cooker at the weekend, and plan leftovers from my roast (e.g. Chicken & mushroom risotto after Roast chicken or Ham, egg & chips after Roast Gammon).

I wouldn't prepare your salads/veg too many days in advance as they could lose vitamins.

To be honest, you might be better off doing a lot of the faff/prep such as chopping & freezing onions and then collating a load of either quick recipes or low prep recipes.

I am sad enough to have a whiteboard in my kitchen with a meal plan to help me shop. It has made a huge difference.

[Rhubarbara]

Yes - I'm thinking about a slow cooker but have been a bit conflicted because of opinions on here! I think it could help though.