Belinda Moore

Inspired by Eileen’s record and grocery challenge on her blog, I’ve decided to share my menu plans here each week. I have been talking about offering a wider variety of meals, and maybe by posting the weekly plans on my blog, I will get around to using new recipes? I’ve been contributing to a Menu Planning thread on Nurtured Folk and Simple Savings each week, and love seeing others’ plans to get ideas.

Some good menu planning advice can be found on this page of the Hillbilly Housewife site.

Here’s how Menu Planning works at our place:

I have a sheet of paper on the side of the fridge listing all meals for the week, who’s cooking, baking to do, outings, birthdays and other reminders for the whole family.

On Sunday night I take one of these sheets of paper (they’re printed from a Word doc on the computer with days of the week etc and spaces to hand write all details)… I write the next week’s outings, visitors etc on the list. On the days we have busy afternoons or are home late, I choose a meal from the freezer (I cook in bulk and freeze), or a quick meal. Then I think about what fresh produce I have from the garden, markets or Organics order to use up. This decides the available meals early in the week so that nothing spoils in the fridge.

Next I think about what’s already planned and choose other types of meals to slot into the plan - we divide our usual meals into lists depending on what they’re based on: egg, legumes, rice, potato, fish or bread.

Sometimes we have unexpected visitors or leftovers to use up, and meals change or are inter-changed. But normally, the plan means that once I’ve spent 10 minutes thinking ahead on a Sunday evening, I don’t have to think about meals again for a whole week.

For us, menu planning saves time, wastage, money, stress and ensures we’re eating a good variety of foods through the week.

If you go to the Downloads page on this blog, there are sample menus and grocery lists put together by my friend Sam a couple of years ago. Her menus rotate every four weeks. There are many ways to menu plan, I hope that by sharing ours someone else can enjoy the freedom of those ‘What’s for dinner?’ woes…

If you have any questions about our method of menu planning, please use the Comments function of this post.

If you’d like a helping hand to get started with menu planning, I highly recommend Menu In A Box and for the more advanced menu planners there’s Mealopedia and Menu Plan Mondays at Org Junkie.