Help please: Meal plans and 'stores'

*Foolish*

Please forgive me, head is up my butt at the moment with everything I've got going on, I've done a search and found a lot about meal plans but not much about the must haves for the store cupboard.
I'm planning on doing weekly shops and planning our meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner for me and just dinner for OH apart from its all 3 on weekends) I've never done this before and never really budgeted for food, just had some basics in and then bought as and when and what we fancied (there's the downfall!)
Anyway, could anyone point me in the direction of any threads that list the store cupboard/freezer must haves please or offer any advice?

Many thanks!

~Beanie~

This thread has some good ideas on it: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/433269#Comment_433269

Upsidedown_Bear

Excellent thread suggested by ~Beanie~ and do have a look at the Old Style board and ask there if you want. There's nothing they don't know about meal planning

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33

FireWyrm

What is your level of skill in the kitchen? The biggest savings are to be made when you start buying ingredients rather than 'food'. You need to stear away from the ready meals (I apologise if this is a generalisation) and start making your meals from scratch. That said, you will need a good and varied supply of vegetables each week along with about 3Lbs of varied meat. A number of base staples can be bought in bulk, so, rice, pasta, cous-cous, spaghetti and pulses.

You should have 1 fish dish a week, 1-2 vegetarian dishes, 1 meal containing whole meat and the rest with dry staples such as spag-bol etc. You can vary fish dishes and substitute cheap offal such as liver and kidneys to make your money go further. One of our family favorites is fish pie which can be made with off-cuts of fish from Morrisons who sell this off the counter (its the only reason I go there).

One of our best ever investments was a bread maker which we use daily and have done for the last 8 years. 1.5Kg of bread flour is between 60p and £1 depending on where you get it from. You can make large quantities of tasty good quality bread very easily and it soon becomes second nature to set the machine last thing at night.

Breakfasts are generally cheap cereal from Aldi, porridge, toast etc. My youngest loves toast with sliced banana and cinnamon.

Finally, I cant emphasis enough the importance of a good spice cupboard. Even the most boring and tasteless cut of meat can be improved immensely with herbs and spices. I routinely use the following :

Paprika, turmeric, jerk, dried mixed herbs, nutmeg, cumin, general indian spice, 5 spice, thai 7 spice, cinnamon, pepper, coriander seed, general fish seasoning etc. You can add more as you need and my spice cupboard is like Aladins' cave but these are the ones I have on my work top within easy reach.

There are many resources on the internet, but I found that the best place to learn about cooking was simply by watching the lifestyle channels. Planning meals, once you have a repertoire is easy and comes naturally. Invest in a few basic cook books and plan meals from them in the first instance. After a while, you'll find it easy to just plan a week without straining the brain too much. I find traditional paper planning tedious so I dont do it too often, but I have a weekly meal plans in my mind when I shop and a good general list of meals I can do with what I have available.

*Foolish*

Thanks so much. That's all really helpful.