Meal Planning

I have started meal planning.  

It is a process that takes half an hour to an hour to complete, usually something I do on a weekend but I have found the amount of time and effort it has saved me has been worth the effort. 

I thought I might write a blog entry sharing how I go about doing this and why.

Why meal plan? 

1) It saves time by:

• limiting the amount of time I have to sit pouring over cookbooks, frustratedly asking myself questions like "what am I going to cook tonight?" or "what the heck am I going to do with chicken, two carrots and half a cabbage?"
• limiting the amount of time I spend at the supermarket.  I know exactly what I need to buy so I'm in and out.
• limiting time wasted in the evening defrosting food.  I know what I'm cooking in the evening so it was taken out of the freezer to defrost during the day. 

2) It makes me eat a better diet by:

• forcing me to consider my diet spread across an entire week.  I can see at a glance if I'm not getting enough protein and add/swap in a meat or egg dish somewhere in the week.
• forces me to consider lunches so they're not just an afterthought or skipped.
• enables me to consider alternative breakfasts instead of the same thing every day. 
• I get excited about mixing it up and making new things when I meal plan.  Prior to meal planning I found I'd get home and the frustration with working out what to cook had me making the same thing or nothing. 
• I now eat breakfast every day and cook dinner (or reheat leftovers/frozen cooked meals) every night.  No excuses. No takeaway.

3) It saves me from wasting food:

• I can consider how to use leftovers.  If I make tuna sushi for lunch one day I will plan to use the remaining tuna in a meal either that night or the next night. 
• I plan the meals based around the vegetables from my food connect box collected the Thursday before I plan.  
• It allows me to consider what veges are leftover from the previous week and how to use them first.

4) It saves me money by:

• I create my grocery shopping list from my meal plan (as well as items I know need restocking).  I don't waste money in the supermarket picking up things that I don't need.
• I have lunches planned each day so don't spend any extra money buying lunch. 
• by minimising food wastage I am also saving money. 
• I have a plan and the will to stick to it so I don't cave from exhaustion at the end of the day and buy take-out food anymore. 

 Yay!  Wins all around!

So how do I food plan?

I have a lovely meal planning pad from KiKi-K.  This might be familiar to Metanoia, who I sent another copy of the same pad, and to Grosby who received a portion of my pad for her use.   When my pad runs out I will probably have to get creative and make a set of papers with some ink stamps... or print some out.

But for now I use my KiKi-K pad which shows a kind of meal-planning matrix with the days of the weeks as columns and the meals of the day (breakfast, lunch, dinner & snacks) as rows.  There's a space at the bottom of the rows that I also utelise... but more about that in a bit.

I consider what plans I might have for the week ahead and write in any commitments or plans I know in advance on the meal plan sheet.  (e.g. I'll put a cross through dinner to indicate I won't be cooking it and write the reason  "Bob's birthday party" beside it.)



Am I away from home for any of these meals?  Do I have dinner out with Dajana one night?  Will I be at Mum & Dad's place for dinner sometime?  Will I be late home on a night and therefore need a very quick and easy dinner or perhaps a frozen meal?   Will I be leaving for work very early on another morning?  If so, no scrambled eggs for breakky that day!  It's not a perfect world and plans change but it's a good start!


I sit down with a handful of my cookbooks.   Though there are some books that tend to always find their way into the mix (Donna Hay's 'no time to cook' and Australian Women's Weekly 'Creative Cooking on a Budget') I try to keep it fresh by switching the books around.  Recently I've also included my ipad - abc ifood app, River Cottage app and Australian Womens Weekly cookbook app.  

I have my shopping list beside me and a list of the veges I know are in my fridge/kitchen. 


Then I start to plan - usually I mark in breakfasts first, because they aren't connected to any other meal.  I try to ensure I don't eat the same thing two days in a row.  I know breakfasts on weekdays are rushed so I don't plan for anything fancy - I leave that for weekends.

Next I plan dinners - keeping in mind what vegetables need to be used up first.   I flick through cookbooks and i-pad apps to find recipes that use those kinds of ingredients.   I also keep in mind that I need to keep a range of protein in my diet.  Often, I'll find a recipe to cook the meat/chicken/fish I have or want and then find a separate recipe for a vegetable side - or just make something up!
 
Once dinners are planned I can fill in lunches.  If dinner the night before will leave me with leftovers I put that down for lunch the next day.   If dinner the night before won't allow leftovers I plan for something else easy to put together in the morning, like salad, sushi, a basic bento box or an easy instant cous-cous. 


And the extra line at the very bottom I mentioned?  If a dinner will require something to be defrosted in the morning, something to be made the night before or something to be soaked or marinated throughout the day I will write it in the extra space.   It's usually just one word like 'FISH' or 'CHICKPEAS' and it serves as a simple reminder for me in the morning.



Oh yeah... and one last point... where I have based a meal on a recipe (or more than one) I will record in shorthand the book and the page the recipe is on.  I then leave those cookbooks used in the kitchen for quick and easy access! 

This week's meal plan on my fridge - because of changed plans on Thursday lunch I now have extra gnocchi leftovers and will need to do a reshuffle of dinners, probably ditch the pizza planned for tomorrow night and eat the leftovers then.

Important Points to Meal Planning

• Be flexible.  Recognise that plans change or you may forget to put the chickpeas out to soak in the morning.   Recognise that you may come home very late from work totally wrecked and not want to make fiddly scotch eggs...
• Build flexibility into your plan where appropriate - I almost never plan lunches for weekends.  My Sunday is very sketchy in the above plan.
• Have back-up meals in the freezer - for those nights that you come home wrecked! 
• Mix it up but don't plan meals that are too fancy for the time or effort you can afford.  Keep really fancy-pants meals for weekends when you'll have the time to prepare. 
• Do keep in mind which vegetables need to be used first.  Don't leave the banana smoothie for breakfast until a full week after your shopping... your nanas will be grossed-up by then.
• Consider the ways of getting the best and most from your ingredients.  I tend to never cook a steak because that steak will feed me one meal only.  If I cut it up and use it in a stir-fry or a casserole it will make two meals or more.
• Don't be afraid to chop and change recipes and get familiar with ways to substitute ingredients.  If you have a bunch of kale when a recipe calls for silverbeet or spinach, use the kale!  No white wine but you do have a can of Guiness in the fridge throw in the stout!  
• Know your usual suspect ingredients and keep your fridge/cupboard stocked.   I've discovered that I usually need cream at least once a week and can't live without olive oil.  I go through thyme like you wouldn't believe...  

Do you meal plan?  Is your process similar to mine, more/less meticulous?  What things do you consider when meal planning?

Down To Earth - Biggest Kitchen Table Audit

Rhonda Jean, the author of the Down To Earth blog, has made a call-out to her readers to join her in another Biggest Kitchen Table, this time an audit, or stocktake, of our lives and goals on our path to simplicity.

The first topic for consideration was money and finances.

My control over my finances has made me so proud of myself. It might sound a silly thing to be proud of to those who have had their spending neat and sorted. For me, it was a big effort to stop spending as frivolously, wildly and with cheery abandon as I had been. I was a habitual consumer for immediate satisfaction and not looking to the bigger goals in my life I would need money for.

The way I took control was to create a budget and then set up my bank accounts.

Creating the Budget
I created my budget on an excel spreadsheet which looked like the equation below.

Fortnightly Income

minus expenses
I ensured that I listed all expenses calculated down to the fortnight figure even the annual ones like registration.

minus big savings
I then decided on a figure that I wanted to save from each pay and deducted it from the running total figure. This savings would be first and foremost a 'safety buffer', but also for our wedding and then later for a home deposit.

minus repayments
Previously we had bought a TV which we got on one of those 'pay nothing for 12 months' arrangements. I took the figure of how much I had to pay before the 12 months deadline and then divided that by the number of months remaining.

An interesting note: When we had to use my savings as a safety buffer, like when the car broke down and cost us $1000 to fix, we treated this as if it were a loan from my savings. I included a payback savings figure in the repayments section and included payments to replenish my savings.

minus small savings
The small savings showed an amount I wanted to put aside each pay towards some short term saving goal that would cost more than my allowance but less than our wedding.

minus food budget
Originally I budgeted for $200 of food a fortnight based on my previous grocery shopping experience. This has since been tightened up a great deal and my allowance relaxed a little.

remainder is allowance and small incidentals
Originally I set a fortnightly allowance of $100 which included any activity or purchase I wanted that wasn't groceries or incidentals like medication. I still aim to spend only $100 but since my food budget has tightened I've relaxed my allowance a little. When I get my kitten I expect my expenses will change and I'll have to reconsider my allowance figure.

So my forntightly income was broken down to the last $5 of how it was to be portioned out between my needs and wants... but it was all still just pixels on the screen. How was I going to put it in practice? How was I going to ensure that all those expenses, repayments, savings were going to the right place?


Electronic Envelopes
A popular way of sticking to a budget is to have different envelopes/jars/pouches labelled with one of the expenses of the budget. Money is portioned out to the envelopes and used when the bill/expense is due.

I've implemented a similar method but rather than using physical envelopes and dollars I've opted for an electronic envelope system.

My bank allows for a number of 'sub accounts' to be connected to a main account connected to two cards, an eftpos/ATM card and a debit card. I've created a sub account for small savings, another for bills, another for repayments and another for savings. When my pay comes into my main account I use online banking to shuffle money into the various accounts according to my budget.

The money that remains in my pay account is my spending allowance, incidentals and food budget.

Where possible I make payments on my eftpos card or the debit card used as a credit card. This way I can see where my money has been spent and track my spending habits. Cash has a tendency to disappear from my wallet without a trace.

Changes I want to make in the area of finances
We are currently so under-insured that it is not funny. We need to get health insurance and home contents insurance. This is going to require a reshuffling and tightening of the budget.

I currently owe my big savings account $300 for the latest repairs to our car. I want to pay this back as soon as possible.

I want to add into my budget a HECS (university government loan) repayment figure so at the end of each financial year I can make a bulk payment off my account and get the benefits of a discount on the amount owed and reduce the total amount when it comes time to be reindexed. (If you pay a lump sum of $500 or more, the government will reduce your debt by 10% of your payment).

Now that I have my half of the TV loan paid off, my next small savings project will be to buy a chook-pen and some laying hens.

Two kittens coming into our house soon will change my expenses slightly so I will have to rejig my budget for that.

I want to create a joint high-yield savings account with Rhys for our home deposit.