Goal 1a 2013 - Grocery Shopping

I've made this Goal 1a because it really does (to me anyway) belong with Goal 1 of Menu Planning. My preferred time to shop is early am on Sundays - early enough that you miss the crowds but late enough that they have completely restocked. For me that's between 8.30 and 9am. I'm home by 10.30 at the latest and still have the majority of the day available for more desirable pursuits than grocery shopping. Not that I mind grocery shopping actually, I just loathe it when it's crowded.

The current week's list starts after the previous shop is done. Items are added during the week and then Saturday night or early Sunday morning I look at the menu for the next week and add any necessary items. I also do a round of the cupboards checking levels of such things as soap, toothpaste, toilet paper etc. D laughs at me for the way I write my list:

Top right hand corner - pantry items such as tuna, eggs, bread
Top left hand corner   - household items such as toilet paper, laundry detergent, cat litter
Bottom right hand corner - cold items such as meats, cheese, milk, deli items
Botton left hand corner     - fruit and veg

I don't know why I started doing it this way but I've done it like this for as long as I can remember and it suits me. I don't undestand how people shop without a list - as far as I can see you'd always be forgetting stuff you actually need and/or buying stuff you didn't actually need or want. I very rarely go back to the shops during the week because a. I've planned ahead and bought what we need for the week and b. grocery shops at 5-6pm on a weekday when everyone is in there 'getting something to cook for dinner' are just small little hells on earth.

So far so good with both the meal planning and grocery shopping in 2013. Definitely giving myself an A for effort so far ths year.

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.