In thinking that meal planning can’t be out of the ordinary?

[Fono]

I’ve always operated a system within my household where I will sit down every Sunday morning and plan all of our meals (lunch and dinner) for the following week and then formulate my shopping list based on everything we need specifically for those meals. This means we have minimal wastage at the end of any given week, prevents over-buying and everyone knows exactly what we are eating and when.

I have a board in our kitchen where I’ll write up the meals for the week and recently every time I’ve had a visitor to the house I’m met with the same shocked reaction about meal planning, like it’s a completely foreign concept.

I’d never previously thought that I did anything out of the ordinary and I’d assumed most households did this? If not, I’m genuinely interested to know what other families do? Imo given the cost of living crisis, meal planning is more important than ever!

I think it's the board with meals written out for the week that's the shocker.

Like most people here, I plan what to eat although not a full week usually, and with a fair amount of flexibility. But it's not displayed in the kitchen.

Quite the contrary.
I wait until I see which meat is on offer before I decide what I am going to buy / cook that week. The element of going to the supermarket with tunnel vision of "I must buy X because it is on my plan" must mean people miss the bargains, in my thinking.

In the umpety million threads on here asking how much people spend at the supermarket I am right at the lowest end of spending, and I don't decide my meals for the week before I shop.

I wait until I see which meat is on offer before I decide what I am going to buy / cook that week.
I see what what meat I already have in the freezer (which may include yellow-sticker stuff) before I decide what I am going to buy / cook that week.
Do I win?

I really miss proper deli counters in uk when I could just buy 50g of ham, 4 slices of Krolewsky and bakery where I could buy 1 roll.
Lunch sorted lol. 😂

Spur of the moment shopping with a pound equivalent

Definitely @senua

Found something to do with that cauliflower and aubergine.
Maqlub 😁

Viva la impulsive shopping😂

@BosaNova , I think you've just encapsulated why I meal plan.

It's delicious! 😁
No meat tho, but I have homade stok so that sufficed

DOnt know about onions. We used to pick corn cobs and poppyseed heads from the fields that werent obviously ours as they were all state fields then.

Not sure why you think you know better than I do what was common re potatoes when and where I grew up. Nobody even knew red potatoes existed until I was at least a teenager.
I have never eaten red potatoes in my life but have eaten loads of mash.

I think the poster missed you didn't grow up in uk @katepilar

We didn't do corn, but mum had enough poppy seeds to bake for a year!😂
Oooh and peas.

I am with you on never having red potato. I know they have them now, but not when I was young.

The maqlub without meat is something I'd probably cook on a Friday when it's not a planned meal day - I call it 'bottom of the fridge day'

We don't meal plan but we don't waste food either and cook from scratch. We are rural and have a chest freezer so bung stuff in there, and have plenty in store pulses, tins of tomatoes, oils, etc Just look in the fridge on the day or get some meat out of the freezer the night before, in summer we have veg we have grown so go and see what's looking good. When we shop, we just buy a mix of what looks good/on offer/ we fancy plus the usual suspects and top ups of the stores. I have loads of cook books but only really use them for visitors or special occasions or fun as after a lifetime I can improvise and I'm a very good cook! If we are having visitors to stay or celebrations etc then I will sketch a few ideas and probably anticipate for some special meals but it will adapt in case we want to go out, have a picnic or guests have brought goodies with them. So for us flex is the key. I am economical by having a mix of types of food from a simple veg/pulses meal to something much more complicated and treatish.

I meal plan every week, we both work 10 hour days, so just don’t have time to spend deciding what to cook and going to the shop. I plan breakfast, dinner and snacks, lunches are always left overs from the meal we had the night before as we cook for four people (just me and my wife at home), so have double. I then order everything online for delivery, if I went to the shops I would be distracted and over spend.

I have got used to doing it this way and know the price of most items off the top of my head now so can stick to a budget of £50-70 a week which includes toiletries, cleaning products and pet supplies. We go out every Friday after work for dinner as we’re tired of cooking (usually somewhere cheap like Nandos) and just kind of wing it at weekends as we have more time to pop to the shops and get what we fancy or have food while we’re out, but that in itself stresses me out as I never know how much we are going to spend and then I tend to get distracted by nice things in M&S and spend £25 on one meal. I would say we spend about £400 a month on groceries and eating out.

What I dont understand is people talking about recipes and special ingrediences for a recipe. Do you cook by recipes every day? I thought that everyday cooking is mostly done from the top of your head but perhaps there are different attitude to this?
I remember in one thread the OP was looking up recipes and wanted to cook something new every day.

I used to do this when my kids were still at home but now I'm more likely to just have something 'snacky' rather than an actual meal so I don't bother anymore. Cba.

Yes, I was wondering about people going through six or seven recipes and calculating the number of onions of each colour before making their weekly shopping list.
I suppose if you cook quite a wide range of international recipes then, even if you know them off by heart, using up all the special ingredients gets complicated.

The most annoying opposition to meal planning for me is 'but I won't know if I'll fancy eating sausages on Friday'.

I don't have room to think about what I fancy after working out something I can cook in the allotted time, which all mouths will eat and which is vaguely healthy.

Vague meal planning here. I'll have a think of 3 to 5 meals for the week and we make sure all the ingredients for those are in. The rest of the meals are made up of leftovers.

I cook a lot of double-sized meals in the slow cooker so we eat the rest the following evening. Sometimes exactly the same, sometimes a little different. E.g. chilli con carne with rice and then the next day in tacos with guacamole etc. Or a big batch of bolognese that goes in lasagne one night (big enough for leftovers too) and with spaghetti another night.

So one week we might have lasagne and spaghetti on different days, from the same ingredients and prep, chilli with rice or with tacos on different days from the same ingredients and prep, and maybe two nights we have a curry from the slow cooker with rice and the same leftovers the next day.

The cupboard and freezer always have basics in for the rest of the meals. Baked potatoes with tuna mayonnaise, for example.

We buy the same staples all the time and rotate a lot of the same meals. But a curry will be different depending on spices or whether I use coconut cream or dairy cream etc etc.

I definitely don't decide what we're having on what days. All the fresh ingredients last for a week so we just eat what we fancy on each day.

Tip for fresh herbs - buy a supermarket pot of basil parsley whatever, gently split the bunch into 3 clumps or so and re-pot each clump individually.

Lasts ages. Keep on the kitchen window sill or wherever gets some light.

I buy ingredients ready to cook a number of meals and I also batch cook every couple of weeks so there is always an emergency meal in the fridge or freezer. But I don’t write any of it down and we decide on the day what we fancy. I’d hate a really rigid plan where you have to have spag bol on a Tuesday or you can’t have a spontaneous meal at the pub on the odd night we’re all together.

@katepilar yes I nearly always use a recipe to cook.
I don't cook everyday though, sometimes we have leftovers or a batch cooked a meal from the freezer and DH and DD also share the cooking.
We do eat a wide variety of meals.

@katepilar When you said "when I grew up", I didn't realise that meant "where" as well. Certainly in the past "types of potatoes" have been a thing, which would cover the "when". I obviously don't know what it was like "where" you grew up, and for making such a bold, sweeping statement and over assuming, I do apologise.

@lemmein , that's part of why I meal plan. It's important to eat a balanced diet, and living off 'snacky things' can be dodgy.
Also, if you were preparing food for more than 1, would you do snacky things?