Reluctant meal planning for low effort frugality
Is meal-planning worth it?
When I realised that meal-planning saved us nearly 40% on our grocery bill, I was shocked. I thought I was already being pretty thrifty. After all, I compare prices carefully looking at £/ml or £/kg rather than assuming that similar sized packages were directly comparable. I mostly resist the discounted items, unless I know we’ll eat them. I default to generics and own brands and only buy a name brand when I knew it really made a difference. I used to go through the supermarket counting in my head “Two people means 14 portions of food for dinners over the week. I’ve got enough chicken thighs for four portions plus a tin of chickpeas, that’s another two portions. That’s three main dishes. Plus vegetable for five portions and we had some leftover salad we can have tonight that’s seven plus…”
What I’m trying to say is, I wasn’t throwing money around. Meal-planning took my thrift to a new level.
I’m not sure why I resisted the idea of meal-planning other than that cooking has always been a creative outlet for me and it felt limiting to plan overly. However, the longer my sweetie lived with me, the clearer it became that he wasn’t always keen on my more experimental dishes and the more I turned to recipes. No complaints, using more recipes has taught me to be a better cook. It also got me meal planning. After all you can’t follow a recipe if you don’t have all the ingredients. How do you have all the ingredients? You decide what you’re going to make before you shop.
So, I began meal-planning and a couple of things quickly became clear:
When we only bought exactly what we needed for the meals we had planned (plus sundries for breakfast, lunch and snacks) we saved a fortune on food that I didn’t even know we’d been wasting.
Meal-planning was boring and took much longer than it seemed like it should. I needed a system to deal with that or I was going to run out of steam very, very quickly.
What are my meal-planning strategies for long term success?
Plan multiple weeks
The first thing to do is to realise that meal-planning one week at a time is asking for trouble. It means you have to find the energy and creativity to make a new plan every single week and who has the time and energy for that? There are so many better things to do. Take a nap, cut your toenails, literally, almost anything.
Instead block out a morning or an afternoon to work out plans for at least four weeks. Once you have four weeks you have enough to rotate between them without everyone getting completely sick of eating the same flipping thing all the time. You can add more weeks later and i advise you to do so.
Use technology
The whole process is a lot easier with technology on your side. I use an app called Recipe Keeper for meal-planning. It can import recipes from websites or scan them from cook-books and then you can tag and categorise them. You can then assign a recipe to a date and mealtime. The app will generate shopping lists, to which you can add toothpaste, bleach etc, and print if you prefer a paper list. There are loads of these kinds of apps. Feel free to experiment until you find one you like.
If you’re not using an app, make list of recipes in a spreadsheet and, for goodness sakes, include details of where to find the recipes in your list. If they’re online, include the links. If they’re in books, include book titles and page numbers. If you must use a paper list, well, you do you. You still need to write down where to find your recipes.
Categorise all the things
OK, so you’ve gathered the recipes you are happy to put in your initial four week rotation. (Remember you can add weeks later, my rotation is up to about nine weeks now.) Now categorise those dishes into groups that make sense to you. Some possible categories: chicken, fish, curries, stir fries, casseroles, slow cooked, pasta, vegetarian, under 20mins. The key to your categories is you want them to be fairly broad, because you are going to use one or two categories for each day of the week.
This is my next big tip for making meal planning easy. When your week has a pattern it makes it much easier to slot dishes into that pattern. It also means that when it comes time to cook you know what category of dish you’ll be making by what day it is.
Our week goes something like this:
Monday - Indian dal with flat breads. I have sooooo many dal recipes - thank you Internet!
Tuesday - East Asian chicken or tofu curry - usually using a ready made curry paste. Quick, simple, tasty.
Wednesday - Pork - usually chops or stir fry. Again something quick and simple.
Thursday - Another vegetarian dish - either the other half of the packet of tofu or something with chickpeas.
Friday - Wild card - maybe fish cakes or pasta or bangers and mash or burgers.
Saturday/Sunday - usually something that takes a bit more time to cook like a stew or braised dish, or else a roast dinner.
Work around the rest of your life
Your plan does not have to look like my plan, but I do want to point out the timing element. Dishes that take time to cook happen on the weekend. Week nights are for relatively fast meals. Pay attention to the schedule of your life when planning your meals. Also consider your energy levels through the week. I have the least interest in cooking on Tuesday nights, so protein plus veggies plus curry paste plus coconut milk is about my level. On weekends I enjoy taking the time to make something to make something a bit more involved. Do what works for you. If your kids do after school sports one day and always come home starving give them something big and solid that day. If there’s a day you are always rushed off your feet then do yourself a favour and put in something minimal effort.
Shop to the plan
This is where the magic happens. When you start shopping to a plan you find your trolley looks weirdly empty. It’s ok, you’ll get used to it. Because you are only buying the ingredients you need to make the things in this week’s you plan, you’re not ‘stocking up’ on random items as you go. It’s amazing how much less you buy when you do this.
Iterate
The chances are your first meal plan is not going to be perfect. That’s fine. Once you have the broad structure in place you can make tweaks as you go. Maybe swap one or two nights around. Maybe take out a recipe that isn’t as popular as you thought. Maybe double up a favourite across more than one week. You might like to keep in a ‘Wild Card’ night like I have, so you don’t get bored and you can try out new recipes.
You might get really into meal-planning and find yourself planning breakfasts and lunches too. All power to you I say!
Do you have any meal-planning tips I’ve missed? I’d love to hear them in the comments.