"every minute spent planning is an hour earned." Benjamin Franklin

Today’s article comes from the eBook: PLAN COOK SAVE.

One of the best way to get a lot more out of your day is to be organised. Being organised means you end up with less ‘wasted’ time and more time to do the things that are important. Chapter two of the eBook PLAN COOK SAVE covers how to get organised and plan ahead to save time.

When it comes to putting meals on the table day in and day out and saving money on the groceries, the best organisation tool is a menu plan.

Menu planning is basically planning ahead of time the meals you intend to cook for the period between shopping trips (be it a week or a fortnight) and writing it down for easy reference each day.

A menu plan is great for saving money because you plan your meals based on what you already have on hand, what’s on special, what’s in season, then write your shopping list accordingly. You may plan every single meal, or you may just plan dinners.

I’ve written about menu planning before, you can read about the benefits of menu planning here.

Today’s article is from chapter two of the eBook and is about how to make the menu planning process itself quicker and easier. While menu planning only really takes a couple of minutes each week or each fortnight, you can make the process super quick and easy by using a family favourites meal master list.

The family favourites meal master list

A meal master list is a list of meals that you and your family enjoy eating. They are the meals that you’ve cooked before and that you’re confident cooking and you’re confident your family will eat when you serve them.

A simple list of meals that you can refer to is all you need to make menu planning easier. However, if you add a few extra details to your master list, you can make your list work harder for you. This is what I include in my meal master list:

• meal / recipe
• main ingredient (usually meat, unless it’s a vegetarian dish)
• other essential ingredients (these are ingredients that I don’t necessarily keep stocked in the pantry and so must go on the shopping list if I plan to cook that particular meal)
• recipe source (so I know in which book and on which page I can find that favourite recipe)
• approximate cost per meal (useful for when you’re menu planning on a very tight budget)

I actually keep my meal master list in an excel file and include one more heading: a recipe link. This is for recipes that are stored on my hard drive or on a webpage. I can put a link into the spreadsheet and rather than searching for the recipe, I can simply click the link and up pops the recipe.

The other advantage of using an excel spreadsheet is that you can also filter and sort your meals. So if you’re looking for a recipe that uses chicken thighs for example, you can filter your list to only show those recipes.

(Did I mention that there’s an excel spreadsheet that comes with the eBook with a master meal template and other useful templates? )

The process

Writing up a master meal list is a one time process. Once you’ve got your master meal list set up, all you have to do is add any new family favourite meals to your list as you cook them.

When it comes to writing your menu plan, you can just pull out your list to generate ideas of what to put on your menu plan for the week or fortnight.

(TIP: If you’ve filled in all the headings, you can filter your list to show meals that use ingredients that are in season.)

Simple. Quick.

You know that preparing those meals will be easy, because you’ve cooked them before. And as your meal list grows, the meals you cook become quite varied, because you’re reminded about that great soup you cooked last winter, or that yummy dessert that everyone loved.

The takeaway: give menu planning a go if you don’t already and write up a meal master list to make the menu planning process quick and easy.

Tomorrow: How to use smart shopping tactics to avoid impulse buys and keep your hard earned money in your pocket.

How do you save time when cooking from scratch?

Have you read these articles?:

1. plan cook save–how to cook anything
2. introducing plan cook save – the frugal and thriving ebook
3. plan cook save–starting from scratch

I read this tip the other day on a random website and of course, I can’t find the link again. Here’s the idea: take a photograph of your family meal each night and create an album of family favourites. This way you can show your children what is for dinner or use it to ask them what they would like on the menu. You could take this idea further and take a photo of each prepared vegetable you normally eat and ask fussy eaters to choose which vegetables they want to eat (with maybe a rule like there has to be one green vegetable).

Have you read these articles?:

1. menu planning for weight loss
2. The Benefits Of Menu Planning
3. What’s for Dinner? The Basics of Menu Planning

You know that when the little fella is using the fat rolls around your waist as a staircase it’s time to lose some weight.

Like anyone, we tend to fall into eating habits. Week in, week out, the same old tried and true meals over and over. They’re easy, I don’t have to think about whether I have the ingredients on hand or look up recipes or wonder how the meal will turn out, or whether we will like it.

It takes effort to break out of regular eating habits and form new ones. It takes thought, planning, experimentation and organisation. Whether like me you want to lose weight or eat healthy, whether you have to eat differently for health reasons or you just want to shake up the regular routine and add a bit of variety to your meal mainstays, a menu plan makes the transition to a new diet easier.

1. Plan your meals

In order to break a habitual eating pattern and create a new one, you need to spend a little time at the beginning researching new meal ideas, getting familiar with ingredients, recipes and preparation techniques and planning your meals around your family’s routine. While I always think it pays to do a menu plan, spending some time planning out your meals means that when it comes to crunch time (dinner time), you’re in the mindset to cook the new meal rather than falling back on old staples.

I don’t usually menu plan breakfast, lunch or snacks, but while we’re transitioning from old eating habits to new, I have been menu planning every mouthful. When we eat habitually, we don’t think about it much. By planning in advance, I still don’t have to think too much about what I’m eating – I’ve done all the thinking at menu planning time.

For more information on menu planning, check out the posts on the benefits and how to.

2. Plan your shopping list

After a while, it’s easy to whip round the supermarket grabbing the usual staples. You know the meals, you know the ingredients you have to have on hand. New meals often call for new ingredients, so to ensure that they are on hand (saving you time by not having to run to the shops to get forgotten ingredients, or worse, getting take out) writing a comprehensive shopping list at the same time as you do your menu plan means your kitchen is stocked with the healthy food that you want to be eating.

It takes a few extra minutes at the front end to plan ahead and write out a few lists, but saves much time and angst later on.

Use your menu plan and your shopping list to ensure that your kitchen is stocked with the food you want to be eating for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and drinks. Planning well and sticking to your plan will ensure that all the new foods get eaten without going off.

3. Stock your kitchen with good snacks

Not eating ‘naughty’ foods all the time is easier if you don’t have them on hand. If I’m hungry enough, then I’ll eat the fruit in the fruit bowl, because there is no other choice. It’s hard to snack well if there is too much temptation to eat cookies or whatever in the pantry.

The other thing I find about snacking well is that if I have good snacks on hand, I don’t tend to gorge myself at dinner time because I’m ‘starving’. I’ve never been much of a snacker, always a big meal girl. I’m trialling small meals and snacks to see if that makes a difference.

On the menu

So, what have we been eating? I joined Dr John Tickell’s Weigh It Up programme for some motivation. I liked the sound of his low HI (human interference) approach to food, although he still recommends canola spread and low fat cheese, so I take some ideas from this website and use real foods like butter and whole fat dairy – we just eat a lot less than what we have been.

Breakfast

• Egg, baked beans, mushrooms (and vegies)
• Porridge with fruit, nuts and seeds
• Bircher muesli
• Toasted muesli
• Smoothies
• Wholemeal pancakes with fruit

Lunch

• Leftovers
• Brown rice, quinoa and tuna salad (with lettuce, tomato, parsley, dressing and whatever else is in the fridge)
• vegetable soup (unless you have a massive stock pot, you need to halve this soup. It is really yum, although I used half beef stock and half homemade vegetable stock)
• Salad wraps

Dinner

• Stir fries
• Meat and veg (too easy: cook up a little steak or chicken and steam some mixed vegetables. I do add a little butter, lemon juice and seeds to the vegetables.)
• Ratatouille and quinoa
• Fish and veg (sans chardonnay sauce – I’ll have to share that recipe another time)
• Our usual meals with less butter, cream, fat, sugar and white flour so whole meal pasta with tomato sauce for example.

Snacks

• Nuts and seeds
• Fruit
• Yogurt
• Miso soup
• Dark chocolate and the occasional baked item or desert (no need to go overboard with this dieting thing )

P.S. Not sure how much weight I’ve lost as we don’t own a set of scales, but as a friend suggested, I’ve taken tape measurements. After week one, I’ve lost 4cm around my waist and I can go beyond 7 push-ups – just. Progress. I like it.

Have you read these articles?:

1. The Benefits Of Menu Planning
2. What’s for Dinner? The Basics of Menu Planning
3. tip tuesday– pictorial menu planning for young children

Last week I wrote about how much we spend on the groceries. To recap, we spend $85 a week for the two of us on all food groceries as well as toiletries, cleaning, laundry, cat food and litter and any alcohol (not that it’s much – none for me for the last 6 months)!

This week, I thought I would share with you our current menu plan for the fortnight that shows what we eat for the amount we spend.

This menu plan is by no means comprehensive of our cooking repertoire. What we eat changes with the seasons. For example, dishes like curried lentils feature more in winter.

There are a few extra meat dishes at the moment. Being preggers, I’m trying to up my iron intake. I’ve gone from all good to aneamic in 10 weeks, so more meat for me.

Where I write mixed vegetables, it usually includes either potato, sweet potato or pumpkin (or a combo) in whatever form, and steamed greens.

This week we have fresh zucchini, broccoli, snow peas, carrot, pumpkin, capsicum, lettuce, avocado, tomato, and mushrooms in the fridge, spinach in the garden, potatoes, onion and garlic in the pantry, as well as frozen peas, beans, corn and broad beans in the freezer. We also bought bananas, nectarines, apples, passionfruit, a mango, blueberries and strawberries.

Fri: Steak with date and chilli chutney and mixed vegetables

Sat: Spanish Omelette with Turkish bread

Sun: Roast Chicken with roast vegetables and steamed greens (as there is just the two of us, I roast chicken drumsticks. Either I make gravy or marinate the chicken in a little lemon juice, olive oil and thyme)

Mon: Ratatouille and polenta

Tues: Lamb chops with mint sauce and fresh mixed vegetables

Wed: Homemade tuna rissoles with aioli and mixed vegetables

Thurs: Chicken marinated in lemon juice and hoi sin sauce with rice and vegetables

Fri: Homemade spaghetti bolognaise (occasionally I will ‘hide’ some extra vegies in the sauce or add kidney beans, otherwise it’s just onion, garlic, herbs, tinned tomatoes and tomato paste)

Sat: vegetable frittata

Sun: Chicken schnitzel and mixed vegetables

Mon: Beef stir fry with brown rice

Wed: Homemade tuna mornay

Thurs: Steak and mixed vegetables.

The menu plan is never set in stone so I’ll swap things around depending on our schedule, energy level or what I feel like cooking. Occasionally we’ll throw in the towel and have takeaway.

As far as other meals go, for breakfast I usually eat an egg on toast every morning, although I vary this with oats in various forms and wholemeal pancakes and fruit. DH is a breakfast skipper no matter how hard I try to force feed him.

Lunches for me is usually leftovers, a ham and salad sandwich, cheese avocado and tomato on toast, mushrooms on toast or whatever I feel like whipping up followed by a piece of fruit. DH takes sandwiches to work.

I drink tea and water, DH drinks cordial and water. If I’ve got energy I’ll do some baking about once a week or once a fortnight. Some dinners are followed by a little ice cream for dessert.

I actually think we eat pretty well although there is always room for improvement. I could cut our grocery spending further, but I think that would compromise our health and the quality of our food. At the moment cutting back isn’t necessary. There are things that I want to do in the future, like make our own bread more often and grow more vegetables, and this will reduce our expenditure without compromising quality.

What’s on your menu plan?

Have you read these articles?:

1. menu planning for weight loss
2. What’s for Dinner? The Basics of Menu Planning
3. The Benefits Of Menu Planning

If you’re wanting to save money on the groceries and make life easier at the same time, then menu planning is the answer.

Menu planning is writing out in advance what you’re going to eat for the next so many days. I’ve written about how to menu plan previously if you want to check it out. There are many different ways to menu plan so adjust it to suit your circumstances.

Over the years my menu planning has changed and evolved to suit our circumstances. Some of the ways it has changed is that we now buy meat in bulk rather than weekly, so I plan out what we are going to eat around what we already have on hand. I’ve started planning weekend lunches more, as I’ve found that’s where we tend to go for takeaway. And we’ve also changed from weekly to fortnightly planning as our pay cycles change.

So why menu plan? Below I’ve listed some of the benefits of menu planning.

Menu Planning Saves You Money

By planning what you are going to eat and writing out a shopping list based on your plan, you aren’t buying food that might get wasted. As supermarkets spend millions on working out ways to tempt you into impulse buying, having a plan helps you avoid impulse and reduce the cost of your grocery bill.

You can use supermarket tactics though to your advantage, by planning meals based on supermarket specials. Decide for yourself though, what is a bargain. Often a supermarket’s idea of value isn’t necessarily good value at all. And a lot of what is in their flyers is pre packaged or junk food that you can make cheaper yourself or avoid altogether.

Planning meals and buying all the groceries at once means less trips to the supermarket, which means less petrol and less temptation to impulse buy.

Planning meals also reduces the need for falling back on takeaway and fast food, which can be horrendously expensive – and can cost you extra petrol to pick it up.

Menu planning helps you plan the cheapest meals for those weeks when it is harder to make ends meet.

Menu Planning Saves You Time

Reducing the amount of times that you go to the supermarket not only saves you money, it saves you time. Running to the shops everyday to pick up something for dinner of grab something that was forgotten eats into your time. And not only going to the supermarket, but going out for takeaway takes time also.

Planning what you’re going to have in advance means that you avoid the ‘what are we having for dinner dilemma’ every night. Having it in writing and easily accessible means that you can get home and go straight into preparing it, or even better, your partner or the kids could have done it for you! This also reduces the nag factor, the other members of your household don’t have to ask what’s for dinner, it’s written there so that they can see for themselves.

When your menu plan is easily accessible, it also serves as a reminder to defrost food before it is needed. Cooking marinated meat or need pre-soaked beans? The menu plan helps remind you that these things need to be done ahead of time.

A menu plan helps increase efficiency by allowing you to easily pre-prepare food. Chopping an onion and know that you’ll need one for tomorrow also? Why not chop it all at once and save time and washing up tomorrow. It only takes a few extra seconds to chop an extra onion, but a lot longer if you have to get everything out again the next day, peel and chop the onion and wash up the board.

A menu plan helps you plan meals around your schedule. So if you have a busy night during the week, you can plan an easy meal for that night, or pre-prepare something for that night. Menu planning also helps you plan double up or bulk meals where you cook extra and freeze the leftovers. These leftovers can then be easy, nutritious and inexpensive reheat meals for busy nights.

And the best time saving benefit? Planning a night off! “This is your night to cook honey, I’m off to soak in the the tub.”

Menu Planning Saves Waste

Menu planning can help you use up what you have before it expires, by planning meals based on what you already have on hand. If you plan a meal that uses sour cream for example, then plan another meal or some baking to use up the rest of the sour cream before it expires.

Stats show that around 40% of the food that we buy gets wasted. That’s almost half of your food bill going straight in the bin. And that’s on average – some people waste more! To put this into real terms, the Australia Bureau of Stats revealed that the average family basket of groceries in 2007 cost $281 per week. If 40% is being wasted then the average family is literally throwing close to $6,000 in the bin per year.

Menu planning to reduce waste alone could save you big time on the grocery bill.

Menu Planning Can Improve Nutrition And Diet

Planning meals can help ensure that you are eating a balance of foods. You may plan a beef meal one night followed by a vegetarian meal, followed by a quick pasta on a busy night, followed by a fish meal. Planning can also ensure you have a pantry stocked full of all the good foods, whilst avoiding all those junk foods. They’re not tempting you if they’re not in the pantry.

Menu Planning Allows You To Be More Creative in The Kitchen

One of the biggest criticisms of menu planning is that it stifles creativity. I think that it’s just the opposite.

Do you have dozens of cook books and magazines? How often do you try something new? Do you look at the recipes and think, I don’t have the ingredients on hand. Sitting down to menu plan means that you can thumb through those cookbooks and plan to cook a new recipe, write down the ingredients that you need and ensure that they are on hand when you go to cook it. I find that with menu planning I cook more new recipes than if I don’t plan.

But what about that spontaneous creativity that comes when you look into the pantry and whip something  up outrageous without rules and without recipes? Again, I think that planning helps here too. If you don’t have food in the fridge and in the pantry, then these spontaneous forays into creativity are practically impossible anyway. Sometimes it pays to plan for spontaneity.

I usually plan a ‘free’ day. This day is interchangeable. If my free day is on Wednesday, but I feel creative on Tuesday, well I switch. Sometimes I’ve planned chicken pie, but would rather seared chicken with creamy mustard sauce. Nothing is set in stone, a menu plan is there to help you, not impede you.

I’ve been menu planning now for almost 8 years. While having a well stocked kitchen gets me around those lazy weeks where I don’t plan, things run much more smoothly and I save a lot more money and time when I do menu plan.

Have you read these articles?:

1. What’s for Dinner? The Basics of Menu Planning
2. menu planning for weight loss
3. tip tuesday– pictorial menu planning for young children

When I first began to fend for myself, I naturally found myself menu planning. I lived with two other adults, and the job of shopping and cooking fell to me. The only way I could feed three adults on less that $20 each a week was to plan ahead.

While this was a few years back and the cost of food has risen a lot since then, I can still feed hubby and I for around $80 per week.

I continue to menu plan, although the methods I use are a little different now.  For instance, I tend to stock the pantry and the freezer with staples and plan around what I have on hand, supplementing staples with fresh produce and dairy.

Planning is one of the key elements to saving money. Meal planning makes drawing up a shopping list quick and easy, it helps prevent impulse buying, it stops you having to go back to the shop for forgotten items, it reduces waste by buying only what you are going to use. By planning you save time by not going to the shops every day, you save petrol, and you save money by not buying takeaway.

Menu planning sometimes sounds intense, but it is really just a matter writing out what you plan to eat for the upcoming week. While it may seem that this is constraining, planning ahead gives you the freedom not to have to worry about what to cook every night. I don’t plan every meal. Breakfast and lunch are not planned. I usually leave one day a week out for surprise night.

Tips for Menu Planning

• Write out your menu plan. Having it on paper saves having to remember everything.
• Plan at least a week in advance. Depending on your circumstances it might make more sense to plan a fortnight or a month of meals. Experiment and do what suits you. I like to plan weekly, because I usually have to get vegetables, milk and bread every week. (Update 1/2012: we now plan fortnightly to match our pay cycle).
• Plan around what you already have on hand. I usually stockpile staples such as rice and tinned food, and buy meat in bulk at the wholesaler, so I plan around what meat and staples I have in the cupboard. This means I usually only have to get a few fresh ingredients each week, and one or two things to restock the pantry. If you buy cream (or other perishable) for one recipe, try to include another so that the cream is used before it spoils.
• Check the supermarket catalogues for specials on items that you normally buy or on items that you can stock in the pantry and use. If there are good specials, then plan your meals around what’s on special.
• Keep a list of family favourites to refer to so that writing out a menu plan is easier. Writing out a menu plan then is just a matter of mixing and matching meals you know everyone will eat.
• Write a shopping list based on what you will need. Once you have your menu plan, write a shopping list based on what you need for the meals on your plan. This prevents forgotten items and return trips to the shop, impulse buying and reduces waste by not buying what you don’t need.
• Plan a new recipe day where you cook something new. If you’re anything like me, you have a thousand cookbooks and magazines with tempting recipes that you never try. Exploring new dishes and expanding the family favourites list adds spice to life.
• Plan to have a day off. It’s hard coming up with the goods every night of the year. Some people do it. I don’t know how they manage it. You don’t have to. Let someone else do the cooking, have a “catch and kill” night where everyone fends for themselves, or a leftover smorgasbord night where everyone grabs what they want from the leftovers and it’s just a matter of reheat and serve.
• Plan around events. If Wednesday night is when you get home late, then plan to reheat leftovers or cook something easy that night (that’s if you can’t get someone else to cook!) Having a plan for what you are going to cook means that you can begin preparing the meal the night before, making it quicker and easier on busy nights.
• Plan a nutritional balance. Try alternating between meat and vegetarian meals to cut costs, plan a fish night, a chicken night etc.
• Keep your menu plan where it is easy to see, like on the fridge door. This serves as a reminder to defrost what you need in time and other people in the household will know what is for dinner without having to ask – maybe they can even step in a cook it for you!
• Keep your menu plans and recycle them. Rather than writing out a whole new plan, you could pull out one from the same time last year.
• Plan to cook a double up meal – meals that are easily doubled like bolognaise sauce, curry or stew. Freeze half and you have a ready-made reheat meal for a busy night or when you don’t feel like cooking.
• Have a few standbys for days when you just can’t face cooking. A jar of spag bol, a tin baked beans, a frozen pie – something easy to throw together that means you don’t need to resort to expensive takeaway.

Rather than being a hassle or boring, menu planning makes life easier by taking the ‘what’s for dinner’ dilemma out of each and every evening.

Have you read these articles?:

1. The Benefits Of Menu Planning
2. menu planning for weight loss
3. tip tuesday– pictorial menu planning for young children