Monthly meal plans

Maiden_Mum

Hi . I am keen to reduce my food bills and know from reading on here that meal planning is a good way to achieve this. I was wondering if anyone who creates monthly meal plans would be willing to share them on here? I have to create gluten-free meals as my DS has Coeliacs but that doesn't matter too much in respect of other people's meal plans as I may be able to adapt them anyway, We seem to eat the same things week in, week out and I think we could all do with a bit of variety!

JIL

I did a monthly meal plan for this month.

I started off by listing a load of food that I had in the freezer one item per cell on a spreadsheet.

Then I went back over the food and turned it into meals.

I then listed the days and dates knowing I would want to use a roast on a Sunday, a curry on a Saturday, a shepherds pie on a Monday, a pasta or cous cous dish on a Thursday, a fish dish on a Friday, that sort of thing. I then cut and pasted from the original list deleting as I went along. It didn't take long. I then left a column at the side and used this to remind me what fresh stuff I would need to buy.

I printed it off and stuck it on the freezer door. Daughter took a photo of it and no longer asks what is for tea, she does shifts so sometimes she has dinner with us, sometimes she has it on a plate and warmed up and sometimes she has bits of what we have in a packed lunch the following day.
Hope that makes sense.

I stuck to it this week just gone,but not over fussed about next weeks. But it will get stuff out of the freezer and hopefully cut down waste and save money.

I have also planned lunches for the following weeks. This will be from home made soups and leftovers which I know we will have as they have been planned in.

moneyistooshorttomention

Pinterest probably has some boards that have meal plans "clipped" to them.

Try putting into it "gluten free meal plans" and I'd imagine you'd find some.

EDIT; I just tried it and put in "gluten free meal plans" and 3 Boards came up under that heading. Quick glance at the first - and you'd probably get a lot of good ideas.

Katieowl

I find it easier to menu plan for just a few days at a time now (I've done weekly/fortnightly plans in the past) because now there's just three of us it's easier to make sure all the leftovers get used up, if bits and pieces are starting to accumulate I can just tell them today x y or z.

Is there an actual gluten free thread on here? I did try searching but not sure I did it right, didn't find anything. I eat entirely GF by necessity and cook mostly GF for work and home, I'd be a regular contributor on a thread if there was one as I have loads of experience now I could share.

trailingspouse

I meal plan on a weekly basis - but only in very broad terms.

So, I might decide 'Monday - mince', 'Tuesday - fish', 'Wednesday - pork chops' - but when the day comes around I decide what exactly I'm going to make, depending on how busy we are, how hungry we are etc.

So - 'Monday mince' might be burgers, or mince and tatties or spag bol etc etc. This is what works best for us.

Tink_04

I usually meal plan for a week, it can be quite loose like

M meat free
T mince dish
W chicken
T fish
F pork/sausages
S pizza
S dinner

Then decide what I want around that - I make my own adaptations as I’m GF Katieowl but everyone else is fine.

Work from what you like and maybe try one new thing a week to start you off

CurlyTop

Hi

For years, I monthly meal planned. It was timed to fit in and around payday.

Last year for some reason, I started to change to weekly and fortnightly. Not sure why but I did find my spending going up. Then again, I also found that I was buying for buyings sake.

In the month of December, I was lucky to get some Sainsburys voucher from work and combined with my nectar points and a £12 money off voucher if I spent over £60, my bill of £126 meant I had to pay £9.26 to it. This has given me the impetus to keep to the monthly plan.

I bought a write on/ wipe off board from £1 shop and wrote down contents of freezers and the main tins from the store cupboards that I know we use regularly and often. I did this because I was forgetting what I had in and was re-buying... which was leading my husband to ask if I was stock piling for the end of the world.

From this, I then write 30 evening meals. These are written for the month but if say for instance, I don't fancy making chilli, I'll cook something else from the plan. The main idea is that the meat and fish and some veg, such as peas, peppers, onions, celery and leeks are in the freezer and in the main I should have most things to make a meal. It's just that weekly I may need to top up with some fresh veg, fruit and most definitely milk and bread (for dh). We rarely eat potatoes through the week but I do enjoy my roast dinner and always have spuds in for that. As I take things out of the freezer etc, I deduct from the write on/wipe off.

There is only DH and I and as I do the main cooking because he doesn't get in from work until 3 hrs after me, it's not too bad for me to keep track of.

I have IBS and have had to change my diet. I have reduced down on wheat and stopped eating bread. I changed to having oatcakes for lunch, although I can't have these every day as this can be too much oats for me, so will have every other day. I'm not a great soup eater and so for work, in the winter, I don't really tend to take much in for lunch with me other than oatcakes or rice cakes. In the summer I'll take salads. I have a very sweet tooth, so for deserts, I will have small block of Aldi dark chocolate of a night time or a dark choc soya desert. I did go through a spell of making dark chocolate rice krispies cakes with mini marshmallows on top. Aldis dark choc orange rice cake bars are good for a work snack.

At the end of the month whatever is left on the write on/wipe off boards, forms the basis for the next month.

I also split my shop across different shops and tootle along with my shopping trolley to Home Bargains for toiletries, loo roll, shampoo and the likes of bisto and campbells condensed soup. I go to Aldi for the main stuff and anything I can't get from there, I will go to Sainsburys for. I was going to Asda but I hate the shop and if I go to Sainsburys it means I get Nectar points that I can cash in at christmas. I also shop at Iceland for frozen fish and veg.

Phew, not sure how much of this helps but hope it gives you an idea.

suki1964

I loosely meal plan by looking at what's at a price I'm willing to pay in lidls then Tesco

This week it was haddock, a whole chicken, some reduced price pork belly and some reduced price chicken drumsticks and two reduced steaks

Veg was mainly salad and root veg

Today it's roast chicken
Monday, I'll thin slice the steaks fry with sliced onions and some sliced mushrooms , stir into a pepper sauce and top jacket potatoes ( 2 small steaks feeding 3, 2 of us manual workers so hungry)
Tues left over chicken fried with spring onions, peppers, some old mange tout sat here wilting, a sweet chilli sauce and served on rice
Wed Rosemary chicken thighs, or chicken curry
Thurs either Rosemary chicken thighs or curry
Frid fish and chips or fish pie ( I've a piece of salmon in the freezer)
Saturday is CBA night and it might be as simple as a toasted cheese sandwich

For me it's about looking at an ingredient and knowing what I can do with it, I need a good selection of recipes. For inspiration I watch cookery programmes and if I like a recipe look it up online, and the what's for dinner thread. I won't buy an ingredient just for one recipe. If we fancy lasagne or bolognaise and it was turkey mince on offer or ys I'd use that instead of buying the more expensive beef mince. If I don't have an ingredient I just miss it out unless I know I can use it elsewhere. I have a store cupboard of the spices I use a lot of, think Indian and Chinese. I keep a store of tinned toms, tomato pur!e and tinned pulses. I buy packs of frozen chopped chilli, garlic and ginger. Not the cheapest option, but no waste so can work out cheaper ( the belly of pork will be turned into a braised Chinese dish sometime in the future when I have leeks and peppers to use up)

For 3 adults, breakfast lunch and dinners ( cat food , cleaning materials, toiletries etc) my shopping bill averages out at £35 a week. This week, my first spend since before Christmas was £40 because I needed cat food, tinned foods, cooking oil, some cleaning materials and some toiletries. Next week it will be back to bare bones - proteins and veg

I'm lucky that I have a microwave and toaster in work so I can take left overs or just some bread to toast to have with HM hummus or make rail pate Mums at home, she can use leftovers for lunch as well. DH I make up a huge pot of soup which he has with sandwiches or HM sausage rolls ( ys sausages and sausage meat make those )

Cooking from scratch does help. I'm not so perfect I make everything, I rarely make bread and whilst I'll make onion barhjees without a thought , naans are usually bought ( usually ys and stuck in the freezer)

Make use of the freezer and use portion control. With a pack of 8 sausages, when 7 is all that's needed , I used to eat the last one so as not to waste it. Now it gets frozen. I've loads of single or twos of sausages in the freezer. Then when there's 7, it's a free dinner

That's how I do it and it works pretty well for us.

Maiden_Mum

Thank you all!

klbooth

I have been meal planning (dinners only) for just over 4 years now and it has been a godsend. I work nights and things had become quite bad with not knowing what we were having for dinner and such a short time from waking up to needing dinner done so can get to work. It has improved the variety of dinners as am not just falling back on the quickest easiest idea at the last minute, it definitely helps with buying food although it is something that has got a little out of hand again lately so am having a wake up moment this year to get back on track.

I also use it as a reward system. The kids get to choose 4 meals a month and if they have any special achievements then they get an extra meal for each one. I get to choose when we have them though to fit in with work schedule etc.

One thing I did was discover a website called saving dinners or something like that and it introduced me to batch preparing food which I love. So when I have a quiet run of shifts I can get all the ingredients in and then prepare mass amounts of meals ready to cook. So all the sauces/chopping/preparing etc has been done and then bagged and frozen. I just need to defrost on the night and cook, most of these meals are ready in the time it takes for a chicken breast to cook. My kids are ridiculously fussy so most of these meals are chicken based but we managed to find a few that were acceptable so I will make up 4 of each type and then I have one a month generally for the next 4mths. I find it so much more time efficient then starting from scratch each evening when I am very time poor.

So while we have a lot of the same meals every month I am ok with that. When I started I did the meal planning every week but we just ended up with the kids choosing pancakes every week or pizza, lol. This way they have to broaden their choices a little and we end up with real food choices which is awesome. Hubby gets 4 choices a month as well, wouldn't want him to be left out!! I get to fill in the blanks, I usually leave a few days blank over the month in case something happens and we have to bump a planned meal I have a slot to put it on without the kids losing one of their treasured choices.

Anyway, good luck with your meal planning. It is so much easier to plan food buying if you know what you will be eating!

S_Wales_Saver

Another vote here for monthly meal planning. I plan at the end of each month for the following month using google sheets. I used to use Microsoft office Excel, but google docs is free and as it’s cloud based I can access it anywhere. Since I cook for six people including one diabetic, one vegetarian and two nine year olds, the plan keeps me on track.

My template has a column for the date, then our evening meal, twins’ meal (usually the same but two nights a week they have activities that mean a lighter meal is needed eg beans on toast, toasted sandwich, baked potato), twins activities (to keep me on time), school meal (so that they don’t have the same twice) and a column for any shopping required.

I usually roughly map meals first for the whole month, putting fish, pasta, curry, minced beef, chicken etc before deciding what exactly to cook. It’s very rare for us to have the same thing twice in a month, but we would for example have pasta most weeks, alternating between spaghetti bolognaise, lasagne, chicken pasta bake, spaghetti marinara with meatballs, chilli beef pasta. Although the plan is made, things do happen, but because it’s web based it’s very easy to swap days around if needed.

It sounds detailed but with a template is quite quick to complete and as it can be accessed on my tablet it prompts me to take meat out of the freezer in time and on my phone acts as a shopping list.

I am going to copy your idea klbooth and let the twins pick four meals for the month. I think that would go down very well, although one of them does have quite a bit of input as she’s very interested in cooking.