Tips For Meal Planning

I'm trying something different this week.... I'm going to meal plan.

To be honest, the idea makes me slightly nervous - it's so grown up, it's what mums do (ahhh…Stace you are one) and it feels so formal but I'm excited to give it a go and I'd love to take you along for the ride.

Here are the four reasons I think meal planning is a good idea:

1. Less time – Meal planning is efficient. Over the last few weeks, my babe's gone from two sleeps a day to just one so I don't have as much time as I once did to cook and/or think of meal ideas.
2. New recipes – I want to try some new meals. With my new lack of time, I've fallen into a rut of cooking the same thing over and over again. Quinoa and salmon anyone?
3. Less shopping trips – Who has time for many trips? My meal plan should mean I just have to be at the shops once this week and given I have a busy week ahead, that's a relief.
4. Finances – I love an opportunity to save a dollar. I want to see if meal planning will help with budgeting / finances.

Here's how I’ve meal planned:

1. Chose the cookbooks - I picked three cookbooks that I wanted to cook from – ‘I Quit Sugar’, ‘Jamie's 15 Minute Meals’ and the ‘Clean Living’ cookbook series.
2. Picked a few recipes - I went through each book and wrote the name of the recipes I wanted to try, along with the page reference.
3. Allocated the recipes - I chose my top five recipes and allocated each to a day of the week.
4. Chose which stores to visit - I wrote down the different stores I needed to visit to get all my ingredients as I'm not a supermarket shopper.
5. Wrote my shopping list

I reviewed each recipe and wrote my shopping list for each of the stores, keeping in mind what I already had in the pantry. The process took one episode of ‘River Cottage Australia’ or the equivalent of one hour on the couch. It would have been quicker if I didn't read each of the cookbooks cover to cover and write out 15 options! But cookbooks and I are the best of friends, I lose track of time and my to-do-list whenever one is on my lap.

So tell me friends, do you meal plan? Do you follow a similar process to mine or is there a way I can make my planning a little more efficient? Read my next post on how the week went.

Stace x