How do you meal plan?

[flutterby1]

I'm really good at budgeting but awful at meal planning, it should be a simple thing but I'm useless. Especially at lunches and snacks, how can I meal plan for a week and only visit the supermarket once ?
Thanks

I have a list of potential meals as a prompt on my phone.
I then check freezer and cupboards to see what we've got in. Work out what meals we might want when.
I batch cook so always got something in freezer.
I shop online due to disability (however this helps with meal planning and budget too).
I shop every 10 days.
Plan for all meals and snacks.
Always have extra milk, bread, beans/tomatoes/passata/eggs/frozen veg and frozen chicken breasts for emergency.
This helps us avoid impulse buying/top up shops.

I start by looking in the fridge for what needs to used up. This week we have a lots of Xmas leftovers so will base my meals on those. I ask everyone if there’s anything they particularly want and DC1 usually says “pasta” and DC2 usually wants something spicy. So this week we will have:

• pasta with pancetta and Brussels sprouts and mozzarella (loosely based on a Jamie Oliver recipe with sprouts substituted for savoy cabbage)
• beetroot fritters with smoked salmon (Nigel Slater)
• some sort of curry to mix it up
• and cheese fondue to use up some of the mountain of cheese.

On New Year’s Day I’ll either make a parsnip soup or pull something out of the freezer if we decide to go for a walk. I always have some batch cooked back up meals for when I need something easy. And this also means that I only plan for four or five nights of dinners a week so I don’t have any wastage if I’m feeling lazy one night.

We always have a full fruit bowl and a selection of snacks available. If no one eats the fruit I either chop it up to make a fruit salad and leave in the fridge (for some reason fruit salad is more popular that eating a whole piece of fruit) or I use it for baking.

For lunches, everyone either has leftovers or they have simple meals like sandwiches, something on toast, eggs etc. There’s usually plenty of long life food (tins of beans/tuna/soup, cheese, eggs) to pull together a simple meal.

I don’t plan lunches and snacks, but I do plan dinners.

i have a master list of meals and I select from there for dinners and shop accordingly.

lunch for the children is usually sandwiches, cucumber, yoghurt, fruit so I have those available.

lunch for me is usually some form of pasta or a jacket potato / dinner leftovers so again, I have pasta, pesto, tuna and veg in the fridge to enable me to make whatever I fancy for that.

I don’t snack, the kids usually have fruit or cheese and crackers so again it’s all available.

There is only DH and I so this may not be helpful. We keep a running shopping list in the kitchen so as things run out we add them e.g. tinned tomatoes, tuna, eggs, cheese, different types of pasta, rice etc so we always have the basics of a meal.

Cereal, porridge or toast for breakfast. We keep a folder of simple tried and tested recipes as basic meals from which we pick one or two per week. We batch cook so there is always something like chilli, curry, soup in the freezer, and we try to do something a bit special at the weekend.

All our recipe books (Rick Stein, Hugh F-W, Delia etc) get used (I'm hopeless at remembering recipes) reasonably regularly. Lunch is usually a sandwich and we don't really eat snacks.

Thank you everyone x