Menu Planning

In fits and starts over many years I have made attempts to plan our weekly menu and when it has gone well I have found we eat better, try a variety of new foods and save money on groceries. I often lose impetus for some reason and all of the pieces of paper I wrote the menu plans on become another pile in my paper war!

In the past I have trialed a menu planner app however this fizzled out and again felt like another thing to learn and keep on top of as it was reasonably convoluted. Over the last year I have been the most consistent with meal planning that I have ever been with only a few weeks missed here and there all year. It has been done the old-fashioned way on a piece of paper each week which has then doubled as my shopping list when I go to the supermarket. At the end of each week, however, I have then typed them up and saved them in a file on my laptop labeled with the week they were used. My intention was to repeat them again a year later to save myself having to re write new plans and here we are in the first week of January and I can start using my existing plans again!

I have made the meals planned for each week seasonal so that the ingredients have been at their best price or potentially grown in our garden as a way to save money and this has made a difference to our grocery bill. I also find that the habit of shopping with a grocery list means I spend less and enjoy shopping more as I find I am choosing different ingredients each week. I end up with a range of new things in my pantry and find myself also shopping less aimlessly so end up less likely to buy things I don't need. This can only be good I think!

I have tended to use one particular recipe magazine that I have received for several years at no cost to me via a perk in my job but I am looking forward to perusing some of the many recipe books I have collected over the years and revisiting pages I have seen and many I have been guilty of never looking at. The challenge will be to maintain my discipline, however I think my idea of having repeated menus will work well. All I have to do is fill in the gaps from last year - some just meals on certain days, where the recipe I chose last year wasn't a success, others whole weeks where life got so busy my planning took a back seat to life events. 

I look forward to feeling more organised, eating well and saving some money on the grocery bill - I will keep you posted on how I go!