My Meal Planning Story

Hard-Boiled Breakfast Egg and Toast with Vegemite

I first started posting my menu online on the Prairie Homemaker forum. The format that it had then suited me, and I made a lasting friend from it. We chatted about food, and found we had lots in common.

I soon found that putting my menu online was much better than on paper because I couldn't lose it.

More recently I have used Meals Matter. The benefit of Meals Matter is that you can set the start of the meal plan to your shopping day. Say if you shop on Wednesday you can set the top day to Wednesday. This way you can see if you have filled the page if you shop weekly that you have all your meals covered without counting.

Now I joy in a meme on Organized Junkie and you see my menu's posted here each Monday. I do a draft so it is like putting the information into Meals Matter, only it is set from Monday to Sunday, so I have to do it slightly in advance.

With the ingredients I buy at the supermarket or on the on-line fruit and vegetable shop that delivers to our door, I make up the menu. I do this by searching on the Taste website. They have nearly everything I need, with new recipes being added. The recipes come from magazines that you buy at the newsagents. I don't think we have had a recipe from there that we haven't liked or didn't work. We do modify some to suit us and they are quite adaptable, you see the other people that have tried the recipes have done that with great success.

I go to my blog post around 5pm each night and look at what I have posted in those two weeks, choose one and print it out. If I have already had it printed and my husband has written cooks notes on it, I will find it in the marbig.

If I have to search for recipes that I can't find on Taste I put them in a place online where I can come back and find them. It is my own forum so I know the information won't be deleted. I am going to post more of my recipe collections for certain ingredients that I have found to be hard to find recipes for. I have already done a post for pork sausages.

So basically I go to Taste or my forum until I have two weeks worth of meals that may include the specials at the fruit market or the meat that was left at the supermarket, as all the meats are necessarily there all the time, but most of them are. If something like silverbeet or rocket is expensive that week I avoid it until the price comes down.

If you have several recipes with the main ingredient, you can choose one with the vegetables that suit.