100 days of Proper Home Cooking – Weekly meal planning

So I thought this would be a fun post to describe one of the aspects that greatly helps our family eat and stick to a good dinner menu.

Each weekend I usually sit down and plan from Cook books or my own thoughts what food we will eat. Simple concept enough – right? This is particularly important if you are trying to get better foods (you tend to eat rubbish if you all are starving and just want something quick). This is also essential I think if you cook for little ones – they should have the best dinners you can in terms of variety of healthy foods and this only comes from creating a planned menu and accompanying shopping list.

We do a big shop once a weekend, followed by a top up of fresher veg or fruit mid week. It has worked for us for years and I like each day to go to our little board on the fridge and see what the plan is (cos half the time I will have forgotten by the time we get home from the shops). As you can see from the picture, we have a little whiteboard stuck to the fridge that I erase each week and write up the menu. Very easy and so much better than random pieces of paper stuck to boards or a note lying somewhere.

This week I thought I would just put out there this tip for planning, and my hope is to each week for our 100 days put up our weekly meal plans so you can get ideas and also test me to think of further ideas to make it even better.

Perhaps this will be doing a two weeks ahead menu system and my one big shop lasts 2 weeks? Why two weeks? Well generally you know two weeks ahead if you are out certain nights eating or with friends etc. I also am going to challenge myself to give each night a theme for the two weeks planning so that you can mix up the types and styles.

That is my biggest weakness with meal planning in that I tend to repeat quite a lot my easy recipes, so let’s give this a go and see what we find out and enjoy!

Please feel free to share your top tips and send your comments to my on Twitter @mamafurfur

Enjoy! Love MFF xx