1. One Week Menu Plan
The secret ingredient for healthier food choices, is in the meal planning. The times you are not prepared, when you don’t have a meal planned, those are the times when you grab a low-quality, pre-made meal from a store.
What I start with, is a one-week-menu plan. There are 2 main rules that I apply here: first, I don’t want to cook 7 different meals for each day of the week, so each dinner should serve my family for 2 days in a row. Second rule is that I want to provide variety, so one dinner in the week will be e.g. a fish meal, an other will be vegetarian, third one will contain meat.
One healthy tip here: instead of looking at your meal the traditional way which is, big chunks of meat, some vegetables, a lot of starches, and sauce the more the better, try to build your meal around vegetables. The majority would be a variety of different vegetables, some starches, and some protein. I encourage you to prioritize plants over meat in your meal-planning.
You may also wonder here that if we have 7 days in a week and I cook a fish meal for 2 days, a vegetarian for the next two, and a meat dish for the fifth and sixth, then what about the seventh day? You can either have one of these three meals for three days in a row with some modification, or use our plan B/backup plan which would be some quick fix meal prepared for us in advance, and kept in the freezer. I will cover that in Module 4 combined with weekly menu examples.
Before I start my weekly menu I do pantry recognition. This usually gives me some meal ideas. I do this mainly for one reason: instead of buying another pack of pasta, or beans, or whatever, first I want to see what I already have, and if I have enough for the meal that I’m planning to make. This trick will contribute to spending less while shopping.
I’m sure that when you begin to follow this system, new ideas will start coming to you. Write them down and come back to them, when you plan your weekly menu. You can also look at the discount offers of the store you visit the most, and see what you would be interested in buying.
First go through your dry ingredients, your freezer, and fridge. Next, write down what you want to use and build meals around it. While you plan your menu, start writing down your shopping list. I understand that this can be a challenge if you’re not that good of a cook. For the beginning just compose the meals with ingredients that you already know how to cook. Do not over-complicate.
2. Prep Plan
Now that we have our menu ready, we need to plan the prep. I plan two days a week for preparation, and on each prep day I would probably cook two dinners. My whole weekly menu plan starts on Wednesdays and that’s because I do my shopping every Tuesday. First, out of my two prep days is Wednesday, and this is when I cook the dinner for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. That’s four days but it’s only two dinners.
What we also need to understand, is that cooking one dinner for two days doesn’t mean that we need to double the time we spend on cooking it. This way we save a lot of time. When we cook one batch of dinner for, let’s say, 5 people, it requires X amount of time. When we double or triple the amount of cooked food, we would spend maybe 20% more time on cooking the bigger batch. Work smarter, not harder, right? 😉 Plus there is less cleaning!
Ok, so the next prepping day would be on Sunday, sometimes Saturday, when I cook the dinner (or dinners) for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. You could also include the dinner for Wednesday, to have it ready to reheat and serve it quickly. Sometimes on Sundays I eat out with family, so then I don’t need any dinner for that day. That is roughly how it looks and works for me. It’s not a strict plan and it changes slightly depending on the types of meals, weekly tasks, events, and surprises that life brings.
Once you start this weekly process of planning and prepping, you will become more efficient. In order to have more free time in the coming weeks, you should prepare bigger batches on your prep days.
Let’s take lasagne for example. On the day you prepare lasagne, you can make not one or two, but four batches. If you don’t have enough baking trays, you can buy the single use aluminium ones. You can then freeze the other two trays of lasagne, and have them for dinner for another time. You just take it out the day before, and you spend zero time on preparing or cleaning. You just did it once.
Of course not all dinners freeze that well, but all pies, moussaka, even enchiladas you could prepare ahead. You can basically get inspired by all the frozen, ready meals found in stores. But you make your own you can save money, and what is more important, you know what you eat. By eating your own meals you definitely eat healthier, and so is your family.
3. Shopping List & Shopping Day
We have our menu ready and we have our prep plan. Now we need to have a shopping list.
To be honest with you, I do all three of them while I’m thinking of my menu. This way, I save time and I don’t forget anything. I use the Evernote app for all my notes, and I can’t live without it.
Back to shopping. I try to take one shopping trip a week. That way, I’m saving time. I include all food items I need for a given week. I usually include two stores in my shopping day. Since I’m located in Norway, I like to buy vegetables mainly at Turkish shops because they have a wider choice range, and lower prices. Plus, they have other items I’m personally interested in like good tea, teff and rice flour, beans and lentils, nice spices etc. Second store I visit, is a store where I have my loyalty program. That’s another way to save money, so why not?
Every two weeks I visit REKO – local market where I can collect pre-orderd products from local farmers and producers. What I buy are essentials: eggs, fresh milk, natural yoghurt, seasonal vegetables and some meat like dear or moose.
Fresh deliveries come to the Turkish shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I plan my shopping day on Tuesday. Because of my Mon-Fri 8-4 schedule, I can’t do shopping in the morning, and the fresh delivery wouldn’t be there on the shelves yet anyway. When I take my son to his afternoon activities, I then have one and a half hours to quickly do the shopping. I have my list, so I go in and grab what I need for the whole week. This way, I also don’t spend more than I have to. If I need a second visit in a store, I would do a quick shop-run on Friday or Saturday morning, to get whatever I’m missing. I try not to, however. I know that many families go on a big shopping trip every Saturday and that works too. I choose Tuesdays though, because I want to avoid long queues on Saturdays when a lot of people have their shopping cart fully packed. Furthermore, most shops on Tuesdays are already supplied with fresh deliveries after the weekend. So that is how it works for me.
Planning is crucial. Start with a good plan and even if you don’t always follow it, try to improve that. You will give yourself excuses, so keep that in mind. Concentrate on progress over perfection. We’re all different types of people; some are perfectionists, some aren’t, some are able to follow a strict diet, some aren’t. Don’t over-complicate and bring variety into your meals.