To ask how much time you spend meal planning?

[Totallyuseless31]

I seem to spend huge amounts of time meal planning, only to not make all the meals as they were too time consuming, or dds ate the ingredients etc. so I spend about an hour a week on it only to fail. How much time do you spend meal planning? And what are your best time saving tips? Also to what extent do you meal plan (eg just evening meals or all meals and snacks)? If you just do evening meals what do you do for the other meals and snacks?

About an hour planning - loads more cooking it. I plan all evening meals, packed lunches and at home lunches plus three meals. I love doing it though- it's a hobby for me. Even then my plan almost never materialises perfectly- life happens, therefore I always have the emergency beans/egg on toast in reserve for those days.

I spend about 15 minutes on a Sunday planning evening meals and putting together a shopping list. I sometimes plan some nice packed lunches like soup or pasta or cheese and biscuits.

I make most of the meals I plan, but then I'm a SAHM with kids in school so I have plenty of time. When I worked I quite often made dinner in the morning before I went to work, and left it in the slow cooker. I hated getting home and having to rush around dealing with the children and cooking at the same time.

I have a slow cooker, a rice cooker with a timer, and an oven with a timer, so that all helps.

I shop monthly and top up with fruit bread and milk when we run out.

My meal planning involves doing the online shop so takes about 1hr - 2 hrs

Day 1 roast
Day 2 left overs
Rest of the week is one of, fish, chicken, pork, mince, beef or lamb.

And I make sure each week we have 1 pasta meal, 1 potato meal and 1 rice meal.

I just cook what we fancy

5-10 minutes twice a week when doing shopping list.

Evening meals planned around evening activities. So quick food on swimming days for example, roasts when I know I'll be in enough in advance to put it in the oven.

I spend my LIFE meal planning! Sometimes I feel like all I think about is food

Maybe about 5 minutes per week maybe while I'm doing the online shopping. I wouldn't really call it planning as such, maybe a few vague ideas about what we might like to have. If I buy too much, then I put a few things in the freezer. If I am short of an ingredient midweek, then I pick it up locally.

About 15-20 minutes. I look at what is still in fridge/freezer that needs eating and plan that first. Then I factor in what activities are happening during the week. Try to have a mix of meals e.g. mince/chicken/fish. Weeks tend to fall into a pattern, for example Monday is always quick turn around so I always do pasta with a sauce and just rotate through 3 different types of sauce. And no one is allowed to eat any ingredients for meals :)

About 2 minutes! I go shopping on Saturday morning.

Saturday - something that takes a while to cook - lasagna, moussaka, curry
Sunday - roast
Monday - usually pasta or chilli
Tuesday - bagels or something frozen & chips (Beavers night)
Wednesday - usually another roast or a cottage pie
Thursday - sausages and jacket potatoes
Friday - something & chips again (Cubs/Scouts)

We usually have a rolling list of dinners that I work through.

Probably about 10 minutes. I have it down to a fine art now.

I don't at all, I probably should though! For instance yesterday we ate chicken breasts with lemon rosemary and garlic, because the chicken needed using. Accompanied with baked potatoes and carrot, tomato and butterbean stew.

No planning at all, not even sure it goes together that well but we ate it!

I have a big freezer and a pantry and can usually put something together but I don't plan unless I am making something special.

We ate a vegetarian pasta dish tonight ... because I had a cabbage in the fridge that needed to be cooked. I will probably make minestrone soup with the rest of it tomorrow and bake a loaf of bread.

All a bit random really.

Probably no more than ten minutes, but I have been meal planning since before it even was a thing ( more or less since I left home in 1996!) and I always have an idea of what I already have in.

About 20 mins as we are making our shopping list. Usually have a easy tea on late nights (Monday's are one of those so we'be had chicken Kiev, chips and peas!) and use meals as a base for others (spag Bol one week freezes and we make chillie the next). Don't plan lunches though

On a Sunday I will spend about 10 mins planning what we are going to eat the coming week. A lot of it depends on DH, as he travels a lot. This week he is not home till Thursday, so I can cook the kids stuff he does not like.

I work 5 days and don't get home till gone 6.30, so I also batch cook for the freezer, so some weeks there is only snacks, fruit, bread etc to get. I have three teenagers, so I make sure there are one portion easy meals for them to make if they are home early or at lunch time. I have made lots of spag bog, chilli and curry to defrost and cook. There is also loads of Nutella and crumpets, fruit, yoghurt and biscuits. Ham and cheese for quick cheese toasties.

So this week:

Sunday - Roast pork and veg.
Monday - Salmon and noodle stir fry
Tuesday - Chicken curry
Wednesday - all out - no cooking
Thursday - Lasagne
Friday - Breaded chicken and potato wedges.

I always have lots of back up in the freezer too. Fresh pasta and ready sauces, fish fingers, chips, peas, quiche.

About once a month I will do a really big shop and then spend the day batch cooking.

Whenever I have a roast chicken I will make chicken noodle soup the next day with the leftovers, the kids love it. That is one that gets saved for when DH is away.

If I don't plan I find that I spend a lot more money and I get tired from having to cook from scratch when I get home.

We spend half an hour on a Saturday morning but it is for main meals only as the kids are at school and dh is at work all day. We do have a lot of meals that rotate every couple of weeks and Tuesday is curry night!

Like another poster said I am always meal planning aka thinking about food. For.me it is a hobby,I love balancing flavours and textures throughout the week with a nod to the nutritional value of the foods,amount of time for preparation and who will be present at each meal. I am proud to say we have virtually no food waste . I often prepare the next days lunch whilst cooking dinner. All breakfasts, lunches, after school snacks and dinners are planned.

I am hopeless at it

I love cooking, I love food

But I have a huge mental block when it comes to planning it and it would save me so much time and mental energy let alone money.

I am vegetarian, trying to eat clean, kids are fussy, DH will eat literally anything and be especially grateful if it's made for him but only roasts meat or cooks oven food or egg fried rice for kids. Work p/t and lots of evening activities for everyone…..

About 6 mins max

5 min tops. I don't plan very well, just buy enough meat for 4-5 meals and lots of vegetables. Then I mix and match. It kind of works for me.

What is this 'meal planning' of which you speak? Does a couple of minutes each day thinking 'what will we have tonight?' count? and ' Did we have pasta last night? okay, we can have it again?' and 'When did we last have something with potatoes?' and often the odd chat about it with DH - and occasionally a passing resident child. Then somebody drops by the supermarket if we need something. I try not to go every day, so we do plan ahead a little. I do think all this planning malarkey can be taken a bit too seriously TBF. So shoot me now.

I only do dinners but I make sure we have all the basics for various breakfasts, lunches, packed lunches, emergency teas, snacks & baking stuff in the big monthly food order - so I have a rough idea of what we will have when.

I do a general plan for a month at a time & order all the freezable/grocery ingredients & check we have the store cupboard ingredients; I guess that takes a couple of hours. Every week I decided which of the month's meals we'll have & I get the fresh stuff needed every 2-3 days. If I get it all in one go it invariably gets eaten by someone. That doesn't take long though, maybe 30 minutes a couple of times a week & dh picks up anything I need in his lunch hour.

dd1 & dh mostly cook one night a week, they either add to the meal plan or pick what they want to cook. I bake with the smaller children on Fridays, they get to pick what they want to make & that goes on the plan.

I aim not to be ambitious or it becomes an awful chore & I generally have a couple of dinner's worth of pizza & garlic bread in the freezer for nights when no-one wants to cook. Recipes depend on the time of year but we generally have

• fish (salmon, fish pie, kedgeree, smoked salmon etc) twice a week
• vegetable soup with bread & cheese once a week
• one 'nursery' meal (e.e. macaroni cheese, cauliflower cheese, dauphinoise, toad-in-the-hole, bangers & mash etc)
• a pasta meal
• one meal (usually Saturday) which is more labour intensive (risotto, veggie roast, something with pastry, curry) - that's my night for trying out new stuff
• then on the last night something like veggie chilli, shepherd's pie, roasted veg & couscous, salads, veggie burgers, baked potatoes.

I plan all the vegetables & other accompaniments for each meal too. What we have when depends on the week's commitments & activities. I have a slow cooker but I never use it.

This week
Sunday roast beef with trimmings followed by tarte aux framboius
Monday spaghetti pesto, salad left over tarte
Tuesday Beef stir fry with egg fried rice, yoghurt and fruit
Wednesday(shopping day) Minestrone soup with fresh bread and cheese followed by fresh fruit
Thursday all.out
Friday Vegetarian lasagne home made ice cream.

Here's my method. I do online shops with Tesco once a fortnight and top up with fresh fruit/veg if needed

About a week before I want the shopping, start an online order. Go through favourites and look at special offers and put a basic basket together based on rough ideas of what I fancy/what's on offer.

At some point during that week, check through cupboards and freezer and see what needs eating up, or get further ideas for meals.

Write on the calendar what we're having for dinner every day. I have one of those family calendars with columns, so DS gets a column, I get a column and another one is dedicated to food!

I only plan dinners and don't plan every dinner. For example, I don't eat with DS twice a week, so we both have leftovers that night.

When I plan, I try to include one or two things that can be batch cooked, like chili or bolog. Meals like use a lot of fresh veg, like stir fry are scheduled for soon after the shopping and then towards the end of the fortnight it's more meals that can be made with store-cupboard or freezer ingredients. I also plan to use up leftovers or things that have been batch cooked for the freezer so things get rotated on a regular basis. I also include things like quiche or pizza in the shop which are not planned for, so that there's always a standby in the freezer.

The actual rootling through the cupboards and planning the meals takes about 15-20mins. The online shopping takes longer as I do several updates as I think of things that we need. I also like to do a thorough trawl of special offers! I quite enjoy online shopping and will do it when I'm watching TV in the evening, so it's not a chore for me.

DS and I both take lunches to school/work so I just make sure we have bread and various sandwich fillings in as well as plenty of fruit. Snacks are fruit, biscuits, sometimes crisps, which I just buy as needed.

As well as cooking extra for the freezer when I'm doing something like chili, I'll also batch cook just for the freezer when I have a chance. Often this is soup to use up veg or something like dhal that takes a while to cook but is very useful to have tucked away in the freezer.

About five minutes when we check whats left in the freezer before going shopping.

I'm rubbish at batch cooking too - I always think I should but never manage it.