Menu Planning

I've fallen off the menu planning wagon and I really need to get back on it. At the moment my husband is at home whilst I'm at work so he's doing the food shopping but I'm still doing most of the cooking. Deciding what to make in the evening is a bit like the 90's TV programme Ready, Steady, Cook where chefs got given a bag of random ingredients and twenty minutes to create a meal out of them.

Yesterday I had a pointed cabbage (we'll gloss over the fact that the Daubentons kale plants in the garden are turning into triffids) some peppers, an aubergine, lots of carrots and three punnets of mushrooms. Things were complicated by the fact that son's girlfriend was eating with us and she doesn't like mushrooms. I used to be much better at planning meals and things need to change!

I've read lots of articles and posts extolling the virtues of meal planning since I've had children and tried quite a few methods. My conclusion is the 5pm dawning realisation that you haven't thought about tea and you will have hungry children in an hour, plus various clubs to get said children to that evening, results in eating an awful lot of pasta pesto with frozen vegetables and is to be avoided if at all possible.

Some homemakers insist that everything has to be planned to the smallest detail and include all meals and snacks. My brain doesn't work like that. I've always kept a selection of snacks and breakfasts that were either instant or could be rustled up with minimum fuss and only wanted to plan main meals.
Breakfasts here mostly revolve around oats, bread and eggs.

Other menu plans worked on the Sunday roast, Monday pasta, Tuesday chicken, Wednesday pizza kind of rotation. That's too restrictive for me but I know plenty of people who like it.

When I first started to plan weekly menus I knew I wanted to have a general idea of what meals I needed to cook but be flexible enough to move if the weeks schedule changed or if some particular food especially needed eating. I also wanted to make sure that leftovers got used up somehow, either in the next day's meals or as a lunch. I wasn't going to stick to cooking spaghetti bolognese if we'd just bought some asparagus in the farm shop or picked tomatoes from the garden.
So I plan 7 meals for the week, assigned to a day each but it's fine if something happens and things get moved round or even pushed onto the next week.
 

Very un-Instagram-worthy blackboard planner with a small reminder that everyone is supposed to be cutting down their plastic consumption this month

I used to do it on paper but it worked best once we bought a huge blackboard so that everybody could see it easily. It  had the bonus of stopping the endless 'what's for tea?' questions and meant (in theory) that somebody else could start making it because they knew what to cook (I sometimes put the cookbook and page number of a recipe). That sometimes works.

My children are 15, 18 and 20 now (I know, I can't believe it either) and so life and meals are a bit more fluid but I still like to have a rough idea of what I'm cooking and who for. Luckily we don't tend to go in for meals that involve individual ingredients like a chicken breast each so it's easy to extend meals or save leftovers for another day.

I try to make what's in the fridge and freezer my starting points, plus what's in the garden. I try very hard to eat local seasonal food, so we don't buy fresh strawberries, asparagus, tomatoes etc out of season. These early summer months are actually hardest for that, I find. You want to eat summery food but it's not ready yet. I don't particularly want to eat raspberries in December but I do feel like eating tomato salad in June. So I do my best and at least if I do buy June tomatoes they've come a couple of hundred miles rather than thousands.

I have shared my cook book collection and I like reading them so I can usually think of something with the ingredients to hand. These two books, both by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are pretty good if I'm stuck. Three Good Things has surprising as well as classic combinations but all the recipes I've used from there have been very good. Ham, squash and marmalade was a recent hit that won over the family sceptics. I often add more ingredients but the recipes are a good jumping off point if I'm totally lacking inspiration.

For extra inspiration, for the last three years I have copied the menu down into a little notebook and I can look back to see what we ate on this date last year and the year before. This week's veggie burger was a result of checking back. I'd forgotten that I made it and that we all liked it so it's back on the menu. I don't tend to make other notes unless it was really dire.

What we were eating in March 2018

The menu from earlier this summer

I do try to avoid getting too stuck in a culinary rut and find different flavours and recipes although I also try to avoid buying lots of specialist ingredients that will only get half used and sit around in my cupboards.
As well as the books, I get ideas from other bloggers- Thrift at Home, No Dig Home and Silver Screen Suppers in the side bar are some that regularly post recipes. Robert Quarry's potatoes in the notebook picture above is a Silver Screen Suppers recipe.

San Choy bau, on the menu for Wednesday this week, was a suggestion from a friend. It needs beansprouts so I'd better go and rinse the ones on my windowsill.