Quite a few people have asked me about meal planning on my personal profile, as I do post about my shopping habits on there so I thought I would share my normal shop and my Meal plans. One of our main outgoings as a family was food and we would spend on average around £250 a month on food with a huge amount of waste. I will admit I did use a lot of convenience food and we didn't have the best diets all round.
For Christmas I received a slow cooker and it's been the bane of my life since, my normal cooker has been dying of a slow death for a while now so it's nice just to be able to pop everything in a pot and leave it. As a result of this we have been eating so much better and I hardly ever throw anything away now.
I do my shopping every 3 weeks at the moment and it normally comes around to £72, so around £24 a week. That includes my sons and other half's sandwich lunches too. I do have a stock up on the fresh items like bread, milk etc. We are pretty lucky as we have a roast dinner every Sunday and the other half's mom buys the meat so that's a little bit off our shopping bill.
I've also switched some of my brands for value brands as they just taste the same simple things like biscuits, crisps and fruit and vegetables can make a huge difference on your shopping bill. Also frozen vegetables are great to use as an add on for quick meals.
70% of my cooking is now done in the slow cooker with a cheat simple meal once in the week. Which can be chicken nuggets, hotdogs, burgers. I normally write all my meals down, stick it on the fridge and decide the night before what we will have the next day.
Here is an example of one of my 3 week meal plans
Chilli/rice (SC)
Cottage pie/veg (SC)
Sausage/mash
Chicken casserole (SC)
Beef stew (SC)
Chicken breast (SC) /mash
Cheese potato pie/beans
Hotdogs/Baps
Mince beef pie/mash/veg
Fish fingers/chips/spaghetti
Nuggets/chips/peas
Pasta/sweetcorn bake (SC)
Chicken curry/rice (SC)
Chicken burgers/Baps
Toad in the hole/veg
Sausage casserole (SC)
Spaghetti bol/garlic bread (SC)
Chicken/veg/pasta soup (SC)
Hunters chicken/new pots/sweetcorn (SC)
Gammon cooked in coke/new pots/veg (SC)
Poached eggs/toast/beans/fried mushrooms