To bloody LOVE meal planning??

[mrsnesbit]

It completes my life truly!

Not done it for AGES, but as food shopping is so bleeding expensive ive started it again this week and shopped accordingly.
Spent £43 on the weeks shopping for me, dh & ds.

So far:
Mon: Pasta, bacon, chicken, tom sauce and garlic bread.
Tues: mash, sausages, yorkshire puddings, brocilli, carrots & gravy
Wed: Jacket spuds, ham, cheese & beans
Thurs: Grilled chicken burgers & salad
Fri: Chicken wraps & cous cous salad
Sat: Home made pizza
Sun: (BARGAIN) Gammon joint £3.50 from tesco...half price sale done in coke in my slow cooker and roast dinner.

Its GREAT! I know what we are having, everything ive bought will be eaten with no waste, its healthy and i feel organised and if i am honest...a bit like a godess of smarmy and smug quality.

Try it
For a week,
go on
give it a go if you dont.....

[EssentialFattyAcid]

I love meal planning and now I do it for a whole month in advance and schedule deliveries every 4 days.

[ClaireDeLoon]

I don't get meal planning. So it's just the two of us but I think 'what meals will I do' and order appropriate ingredients. I always have done. What is the alternative? I buy random stuff and then look in the fridge and try to decide what to cook?

Is there a higher meal planning plane you're all on and I'm just an amateur, I'm not saying this to put anyone down at all, I just really get confused about what meal planning is.

[Fuzzled]

Um yep. That's how I cook

[Tortoiseonthehalfshell]

The women/men thing is utter bollocks, as a quick skim of many of the budgeting/meal planning threads around here will tell you.

But, OP, I'm with you, I LOVE meal planning. I haven't made major savings that way, because I was already cooking pretty cheaply (and DH insists on coming shopping with me and there's always some expensive things or other he 'needs') but I enjoy it nonetheless. I make sure we have the complicated long-cook things on the weekends and the quick stuff on the nights when we work late, also that the things with the freshest ingredients are at the beginning of the shopping week (you have salad at the end of the week and not at the start! That's madness, woman. You should've switched Monday and Thursday's meals), and that leftovers from one meal can be incorporated into another. So we had roast on Sunday, and I diced all the leftovers and gravy and made them into Cornish pasties for tonight. There's always a soup near the end of the shopping week with leftovers from earlier, too.

Smuggity smug smug, me.

[MaeMobley]

Thank you mrsnesbit.

In our case I bet it would be more than 25% because we waste so much and I shop virtually everyday.

It's daft but I hate thinking about food. I wish I could put us all on Slimfast or some meal substitutes.

I am a terrible cook.

[CheerfulYank]

MaeMobley I love your name :)

I'm sometimes a good meal planner and sometimes not. I'm very good at making something out of the last dregs of things in the cupboard though, and using up every little bit of things. Grew up poor, I did. :o

[EricNorthmansMistressOfPotions]

I love meal planning! The weekly shop is a highlight of my week I have foreign students staying and have to be super organised, I'm in meal planning heaven, I have a wall chart and everything!

[MaeMobley]

Thanks CheerfulYank.

Girls (I assume there are no male meal planners on this thread), if I start doing it will I be less stressed out by the whole food thing? I hate that feeling of blankness as I enter the supermarket with 2 DC in tow.

[ErnesttheBavarian]

I want to meal plan, but my mind also goes blank. I need to accommodate one fussy ish child and one veggie. Happy to make either a meal all veggie, or a meal that I can cook and adapt towards the end for veggie eg making stir fry and frying chicken separately to add to the stir fry once i've dished veggie one up.

But my mind goes blank too. The veggie twist has got me.

I would happily, even prefer to cook all veggie, but not got a big enough repertoir.

And now ds1 comes home for lunch every day, and after summer ds2 will too, so have to provide meals twice a day. I am crap at it. My least favourite job.

Help!

[luckywinner]

Mrsnesbit could you meal plan for me . I have such bad morning sickness at the mo and can't open the fridge without retching. My poor dc have had pasta pesto for the past 4 days as I can hold my breath long enough to mix in the pesto. I would love to meal plan though. Fed up of being so disorganised.

[OTheHugeManatee]

Odd...the Tesco founder thing is the opposite with us. Our shopping bill is 30% lower if I do it, as DP will come back with all kinds of random crap 'because it was on special offer'.

[ErnesttheBavarian]

I end up going to supermarket every single day, and no doubt therefore spend three, four times more than I otherwise would/ should. Never mind the stress and time wasted.

[GeekCool]

I have a supermarket addiction I think. I can go and spend hours wandering around.

Does anyone meal plan whilst working FT? I'd like to but I would need meals that can be made really quickly and whilst I do batch cook at times and freeze, I really don't want to spend my weekends cooking like a demon. DH and I are both FT with one Ds.

[minipie]

Geek we both work FT (long hours) but we don't have DC yet.

I sort of meal plan, and we have v quick cooking meals - but if I'm honest we are limited to a repertoire of about 8-10 different meals, and we just buy the ingredients for 5 of those each week (plus some more interesting stuff for the weekends).

(And then it all gets screwed up anyway if one or both of us has to work late and miss dinner...)

[cottonreels]

I would love to be more organised with food shoppping, I sort of buy things we like, vegetables and one or two bits of meat (always have rice, cous cous etc in) and just try to cobble something together to make a meal each day.

I once tried the lovefood hatewaste website which does it for you. The good thing about this was that it used leftover from one meal to make another. So the idea is that if you bought fresh coriander or celery for one meal youll use it again later in the week. I liked the organisation of it, though some of the meals took longer than I'd usually spend and they were more meaty than we prefer (we eat a balance of veggy and meat dishes).

Esentially this is what Id like:
A 4 week rolling programme, that takes into account the season, that uses leftovers from one meal to make the next. Anyone know if this exists already???

Is it a business opportunity for someone to develop you plan on an individual basis according to your tastes and preferences???

[cheesesarnie]

i couldnt shop without a list and probably wouldnt eat without a weekly meal plan.i agree it makes shopping cheaper.it just annoys me when dh says no food for dinner-'LOOK IN THE DIARY'.

[EssentialFattyAcid]

MEal planning is your friend if you both work full time.
Its more efficient and less hassle because you can plan ahead properly. For midweek suppers you need quick to make meals, or meals from the freezer (stock up your freezer by doing double quantities of meatballs/ lasagne etc - eat one and freeze one for later).
There are loads of websites that are helpful for menu planning and for adding new meals to your repetoire, eg Resourcefulcook.com, spoonfed suppers and the Good Food site.

[mrsnesbit]

Yup me too Essentialfatty, i make double portions of curry, bolognase etc and freeze it becuase its then a free meal the week after.

Also have something on toast once a fortnight.

We love baked spuds and these are very cheepo. Only have them on a night we are not working late, so i can sling them in the oven when i get in and they are ready for 6ish.

So far its nearly Thursday and i have not had to spend any more than the £43 i spent on Monday for the weeks shopping. Not been near a shop.

Also bought sandwich stuff on MOnday so we have lunches this week too...or cheese on toast etc.MMMmmm LOVING baked bean toasties at the mo.

ITS BRILL!!

[BsshBossh]

I love meal planning as it saves precious time. 15 mins conversation between DH and I on Sunday morning about the week's meals means a quick shop and speedy weeknight meals and therefore more time to play/relax/(work).

[timidviper]

I bought an american cookbook off Amazon called Saving Dinner which is meal planning with recipes. Each week has 6 recipes and a shopping list split into sections like meat, veg, storecupboard, etc. It is fab.

There is a series of them including normal, veggie, low-carb, frugal and the recipes are quick and really good.

[Karbea]

timid is it recipes that work in the UK?

[gomummygo]

YANBU - I have an abnormal love of meal planning! Saves time, money, and energy.

Timidviper - Saving Dinner is great! :)

[timidviper]

Yes they do work Karbea. There's the odd ingredient you might have to translate (like eggplant to aubergine, etc) and measurements are in cups but they're all quick and easy.

I bought the low carb one just because I liked the look of the recipes and there is a suggestion with each for what to serve it with for a low carb meal or a normal meal.

It's just so easy to make your shopping list from the list in the book too.

[encyclogirl]

Flippin' love it too. I'm saving a fortune this year since I started meal planning, maybe ?500 a month? That's 6k a year! aka a decent holiday.

[InfestationofLannisters]

I love the principle of it, I do.

DD eats most things, bless her.

DH eats meat (too much I would say - in sandwiches for lunch and every night of the week) but no peas lentils or pulses. No fish either.

I eat no meat except for a bit of chicken breast at Christmas but do eat fish. No point getting fish just for me so I don't have it.

DS eats certain types of toast, noodles, crisps, fruit and milk He is autistic.

I sometimes read the threads about menu-planning and dream

But I think it's a good thing.