Thursday 2 November 2017

Menu

One of the things I have found most useful in helping to keep down food shopping, is menu planning.

I currently operate a printable 5 week evening menu plan. As each week finishes, it gets cut off the sheet. The plan operates alongside our outdoor and indoor freezer checklists. That way, I know what we have, where it is, what I need to make to stock up freezers and if money is tight one week, evening meals for a week can be taken from these freezers.

Our menu for the week to come is this:
A * donates the whole or most of the meal from the freezers.

Everything we need for our breakfasts for the above week we already have apart from the yoghurt and some of the fruit on the shopping list element of the menu. Lunch is usually soup which I make up from the list or freezer. Evening meals are what you see here.

I try, when possible, to buy a few extra items each week for my store cupboard. This week it is the butter beans, sugar (for marmalade), Mandarins, Almonds and Walnuts. Seems a lot but I have money to spare for these extra items leftover from other weeks. Some weeks, I may buy nothing or only one item. Sometimes, I buy one item for Christmas etc.

Once I have been shopping I will let you know how much it cost. Even if it is over my usual weekly allowance, I will make that up further into the month when I can bring in more meals from the freezers.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for such a useful post ! It is really great to see how other people do their meal planning !

    ReplyDelete

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