Reverse Meal Planning

joedenise

It was a busy morning today with appointments in both the local town (8 miles away) and the next town (15 miles away in the opposite direction) with about an hour at home in between which was when I fitted in doing the washing and hanging it out on the line!

So it's LOs today for both lunch and dinner - leek and potato soup for lunch and beef and barley stew from the freezer for dinner.  Had a quick breakfast of mushroom omelette using stuff already in fridge.

CCW007

New fridge freezer ordered, will be here next week.  So freezer clearing begins in earnest!

EssexHebridean

Oh yes - there's nothing like necessity to focus the mind on eating from the freezer, is there!

I found there was sufficient chicken from the joints I stripped down last night to feed us for the stir fry it was intended for and leave some over to add to a risotto tonight - so that was a win. I'm leaning towards using frozen mushrooms for that too, and that then saves the last of the fresh ones for use with tomorrow evening's fry up. That should take a pack of sausages, some tattie scones and some each of the black, white and fruit puddings we have in the freezer out as well - two of the sausages will go back in once they have been cooked and those will then go into a sausage pasta or similar in the next few weeks. I've got enough bread stashed in the freezer to use for our toast at the weekend so no need to make a loaf this week. There's definitely space appearing now - and currently I'm not intending that this week's batch-cook will add anything back to the freezer (it will be cauli & pasta cheese bake) although that might change. Some of the lamb shoulder I'm planning on doing for Sunday WILL need to go back in, but that's fine. 

I need to complete next week's meal plan, start sketching out the following weeks, and finalise my shopping list for saturday I think. Although this is the first week of our grocery budget month I'm not planning on doing a lot of stocking up - although I think a job for the weekend is to review how we're doing with storecupboard/stocked up items and see what needs adding to that list. 

CCW007

Lunch - soup from freezer and rolls
Dinner - beef and noodles for OH and aubergine and tomato stew with rice for me - all from freezer

Suffolk_lass

Our chicken went for the roast, a curry (4 portions) and I have made pastry ready to make a small pie and a tray of mince pies to have on standby in the freezer. I actually remembered to liberate a veg curry and some cooked brown rice from the freezer so two more takeaway boxes are bound for the cupboard. The half of the rice will go with the other half of the curry. I might freeze the pie as it's good to have an easy HM ready meal.

There are two portions of courgette soup in the fridge (today's lunch) and too-many eggs. I think I need to make a few of those carrot and courgette cakes ready for the "made in our village" stall at the beginning of December. I want a couple for the stall and one for the coffee table so people taste it (then they will buy them!). I can make and freeze some shortbread too, ready to cook.

As a slight aside but related topic, I am slightly struggling with just one multiway (as in fan, grill, microwave) half size oven and two hotplates on the (LPG bottle) gas hob. So, the aga went on last night at midnight so it did most of its warming on cheap-rate electricity. DH read the meter at midnight. We are going to read the meter again tonight, to see what it used to heat up, then again to test what it uses when on all day, then we will turn it down in the day and up for the evening and measure that too - never done this before but we feel the need to test the KWH differences from fiddling, while we are still on our fixed tariff. It may be cheaper (relatively) to just leave it on, or we might need to set a few alerts to fiddle. Turning it off and on repeatedly is almost certain to blow the element and I remember it is not a good thing from reading. I do have a couple of plug in timers but the aga runs off two fused switches, neither of which are easily accessible, so it will be phone alerts to turn it down and up. 

ruby_eskimo

Think I might have a roast chicken this weekend @Suffolk_lass and then use it in all of the other meals for the rest of the week.  Hope your aga experiments don't give you too much of a headache.

Having a freezer day today - lunch is vegetable soup and dinner is leftover veggie goulash which has been in there a while 😆

EssexHebridean

I love a good energy use study SL - there’s a fair bit of that going on here at the moment notably around the running costs of the immersion heater! I’ve also just ordered some more of the energy monitoring smart pugs as well so once they arrive they will be being pressed into use for various things. Geekery is fun! 

Fry-up ingredients for tonight are all out and defrosting in the fridge. When I get those out to cook later I’ll yank Sunday’s lamb half shoulder out and that will then assist the fridge with keeping cool as it defrosts over the next couple of days too. I actually checked our fridge & freezer temperature last night after watching Martin’s show that we’d recorded - the freezer is now turned back to -18°C - to my shame it had been far colder for rather a long while! The fridge is still sitting at 2°C and I think we’ll probably leave it there - allowing for how little  of my skimmed milk I use in a week it suits me well that my usual 2 pint bottle will currently last the best part of three weeks and I’d sooner not do anything to stop that being the case I think. I will try to remember to alter it’s temperature when we go away though.

I also now have a meal plan in full for next week and sketched out for the week after, a shopping list for this week, and some additions to the stocking up list for next time I decide to deal with that.

Frugalista

We also turned our fridge & freezers down after watching Martins' show.  Hope it makes some saving - however small.

QueenJess

A few use ups today:
- end of leeks used up in cheese, leek and pea orzotto
- half a tin of leftover condensed milk used up making jammy biscuits
- 3 lemons (free from Olio), ys double cream used up in 6x lemon possets
- end of a bag of OOD flour used up making Yorkshire puddings.

Absolutely tons more to use up!

EssexHebridean

I think turning the freezer down HAS cut my use - last night was bare use - no DW, WM or immersion, just background load, and I meant to look at the figure first thing but forgot. I DID look at lunchtime though, so a full 12 - 13 hours into the day - and at that stage we’d used just over 2kWh - and for us that’s pretty low. Time will tell - but it feels like it could have an impact.

Tea tonight was burgers and wedges - mince for the burgers and the buns both from the freezer. It was going to be with chips but I took one look at the price of oven chips in T’s this morning and bought a bag of tatties instead! 😂