Goal 1, 2013 - Meal Planning

After the first couple of months, meal planning using a calendar system becomes a 30 minute exercise once a month. Yes, the initial stages can be a bit time consuming but I can't stress enough how, once the setup is done, just how easy and quick it all becomes.

1. Write down a list of the meals that you and your family like. Flick through your cookbooks, take out those scrap pieces of paper and ask! There is only D and myself and I'm the only cook so this part was easy for me. I kept the list on me and wrote down meals as I thought of them.

2. Type up the list and keep it as a reference file on your PC desktop. This makes it easy to refer to when doing the month's meals and it's also easy to access for adding new meals. I split my list into the following categories:

• fish/seafood
• beef
• pork
• lamb
• chicken
• pasta
• other

The first six are self explanatory. The last contains dishes which can be made with any number of the other options. e.g. roast (chicken, beef, lamb or pork) or fajitas (chicken or beef). This allows a bit of flexibility to either use up something bought in bulk and/or to move the options around a smidge to suit what's happening in a particular week. For example, I may put in fajitas for the last Wednesday of the month but until I get to that week I don't know which variety they'll end up being.

3. Use a decent, customisable calendar. I have a gmail address so I use the google calendar associated with it. You can choose the time frame you want to view (for me, monthly) and you can set events to repeat automatically which is a huge time and flexibility bonus. We have fish at least once a week but who knows what's going to be available 2-4 weeks in advance? So I have fish in as a repeater 'event' every Monday night. Sometimes I chose from my list of fish dishes but often I will just buy whatever I fancy during the grocery shop and serve it baked/fried/grilled with vegetables.

4. Don't be afraid to use the repeater option. If you told someone they were going to have fish every Monday night for the next 6 months, they'd probably turn their nose up at the idea BUT the concept works. If you have enough recipes you are not likely to repeat the same dish quickly and that fact that it's fish/seafood AGAIN on a Monday night is hardly likely to be noticed.

5. There are things which we each like that the other can't stand and with only two of us it's really easy to account for this. How it would go with fussy and/or diverse eaters I'm not sure but I just plan in a double meal maybe once a fortnight and we're both happy. The same goes for dinners out or takeaways. We don't eat out a lot nor do we eat a lot of junk food so 'treats' are usually planned in or happen spontaneously when I forget to take something out of the freezer.

It's back to working well again. January fell apart a bit towards the end but February is progressing well.