Good morning!
I hope you are having a great week. Mine has got off to a productive start so am very happy with that. It has been helped by being more prepped this week than I have been for the last couple of weeks over school holidays. I do love routines and plans but I do also like taking a break from them too. The beauty of taking a break from them is you actually realise how much of a difference they make to your daily life.
Feeding the family and all it entails is one of the biggest tasks of family life for me. Establishing plans to help streamline this activity and make it as simple and efficient as possible has been key for my sanity! This is how I go about it:
Menu planning
This is the first step and menu planning means that I can do one big weekly shop and have all the ingredients I need for the main meals of the week. If you aren’t familiar with my menu planning process you can find it here along with free templates you can use.
A schedule for shopping
I have a simple schedule for getting the shopping done. It isn’t not negotiable but this is what I do 80% of the time and when I keep to this schedule we have enough food to prevent the “there is nothing to eat in this house” cries from the kids! The schedule looks like this:
Big shop – this is the main weekly shop which I do at ALDI at some point from Friday to Sunday. The time and day are totally dependent upon what activities we have on for the weekend. I tend to work out when I will do the shop on Thursday.
Top-up shop - we don’t have the space to buy enough fresh fruit and veg for the week, so need to do a top up shop during the week. I generally do this on a Wednesday or Thursday. Where I do the top-up shop depends on what I have on and where I am out and about.
Meat – I shop weekly for meat at a combination of a local butcher/s and ALDI.
Fruit and veg -a combination of local green grocer/s and ALDI. I have a few greengrocers I like in different locations, so it all depends where I am shopping as to where I go.
Bread – bought on an as needs basis from our local bakery.
Milk and Eggs – we go through an extremely large amount of milk and eggs, so we buy significant amounts each time we are at the supermarket!
A reader recently asked me about asked what were my favourite products from ALDI so I thought I would share my answer in a post! All but one of these items I have been buying from ALDI for quite a while and rate them highly. You can see what they are in this post here - 13 of my ALDI favourites.
I would love to hear what are your favourite ALDI buys, so let me know in the comments what they are!
Unpacking the food shop
One of the reasons I like to do the main food shop on the weekend is so the family can help with the rather huge task of putting the food away and possibly even delegate the shopping to someone else to do!
Occasionally my husband will do the shop but mostly it is me. We have a rule whereby if any of the kids come to the shops with me and help, they don’t have to help unpack when we get home. During the lockdown, only one person has been able to go to the shops, so the kids couldn’t come and help even if they wanted to! Once I get home from the shops, it is all hands on deck – whoever is home needs to help. This process starts with helping get everything from the car to inside the house.
All available kids and adults need to help put things away. Getting kids to help with this part can be super frustrating in the beginning because the kids will ask lots of questions about what goes where, they will shove items away in an untidy fashion and make a mess pouring products into containers.
But the more weeks that they are required to do this, the better they get at it. I have a very common phrase that I repeated many times over the first few months of getting the kids involved – “start with what you know”. I found that one child, in particular, would look for the most obscure items and then ask where they went – it was definitely a work avoidance strategy! So when the kids ask me where an item goes and there are still plenty of items that they know where to put, I remind them to start with what they know and then we work on the other items at the end.
The kids are expected to put the flour in the flour container, rice in the rice container etc and not just shove it away. There is still the occasional shoving of items and when this happens I will have to call the child back to do it properly. Once they work out that they will be called back to do it properly after the fact every time, they work out it is just better to do it properly in the first place.
Initially, the process of getting the kids to help unpack the shopping can take more time than it saves you. You have to show them how to do it, they then might spill it or put it in the wrong container, but there is only one way they will learn and that is by doing it. While initially painful, it is really worthwhile persisting with it and they do get better!
When it comes to fruit and veg I currently tend to put them away myself so I can wash them first, and most often chop them and put them away in containers prepped for the week.
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Take care,
Nic
Oh my goodness Nic - this is brilliant! I don't have any Aldi favourites because our nearest Aldi is over half an hour away and I've not put in the effort but now that I know it has an organic range I may be a convert. I'm going to try your recommendations first!