pic from the Household Organising File
(part of the Organise your Home ecourse)
Do you menu plan?
Menu planning is probably the one thing I do that saves me the MOST time every single week.
It’s also going to save you mo.ney when you start using up all the food in the freezer and in the back of the cupboards. Oh, and not doing so much impulse shopping.
Note – you should do your menu planning BEFORE you go to the shops to do your grocery shopping 😉
Here are the five steps I use:
1. Go to your freezer and cupboards to see what food you have that you need to or want to use, and make a list.
2. Write out a menu plan for a week (if you do weekly shopping) or longer, using recipes to use up that food.
3. Add any items that you need additionally to your weekly shopping list and do your shopping.
4. Stick the menu plan to your fridge.
5. Follow the plan to the letter, or move things around and have Monday’s meal on Wednesday, etc, etc. At least you have the ingredients for all the meals available.
Now you don’t have to rack your brain every night wondering what to cook.
You have a PLAN.
Another tip that will save you lots of time is to cook something on a Sunday afternoon. This meal is not for eating that day, but for freezing.
When you have a busy day it’s easy to just defrost the meal and have a healthy supper on the table in minutes.
We went through a stage where we didn’t buy any meat for two months while we finished everything in the freezer and started on the cupboards.
You see, we all get into a habit of buying the same groceries every week without checking if we really need it.
If you’re not already menu planning, I’d like to encourage you to at least start. Do so for at least a month and give it a good go. If it REALLY doesn’t work with your personal style 🙂 then so be it.
If you already do menu planning, then your challenge for this week is to only buy perishables for your next shopping trip and eat from your freezer and cupboards.
Menu planning saves my sanity!! No more staring into the fridge at 5 o”clock waiting for a meal to suddenly appear. I know what we are going to have. I can plan around different activities and schedules. Having an extra meal in the freezer or just in the fridge for the next day is huge! That saves us from ordering pizza lots of times.
I found that by listing all the meals that we like under headings – meat, chicken, fish, vegetarian; I can rotate meals as well so that we don’t get into the same patterns and have a variety every week. With all the meals on the list i got the menu planner to go for 5 weeks and life is much much simpler.
Megan, that’s a great idea. I’m very loose about it but I do try and have at least one vegetarian meal and one really easy one every week.
Menu planning is a life-saver. I started a binder with plastic sheet protectors and have 4 weeks of menus divided by type, chicken, beef, pork,vegetarian. If I decide that Monday is chicken night, I have 4 recipes to choose from. I take the chosen one out of the binder and tack it to the refrigerator. Under the recipe, I’ve also written instructions on preparing part of the meal the night before and the morning of. For example, take chicken out of freezer on Sunday and put in fridge, cut onions, peppers and mushrooms. ect…The binder also has a grocery list of all the ingredients at the front. It’s so simple. All the menus are re-cycled and there’s always “free” day when everyone just makes whatever they feel like and do their own dishes after.