Tips to make menu planning easier
plus a month of weekly plans with shopping lists to freely download
Good afternoon,
How are you going at the moment? Writing this post in the sunshine, after having run this morning with friends for the first time in weeks, I am in a super mood! Hope you are going well too.
On the blog, I have published, albeit a little late my weekly menu plans for Sept. I did intend to publish them at the start of the week but I broke my computer so that set everything back!
If you check out my menu plans you will notice a few things about them:
They are not the perfect example of what a family should eat! There are lots of ways they could be better nutritionally but when it comes to feeding the family, I don’t aim for perfection, I aim for pretty good and for family harmony! They also only represent one meal in the day, so there is plenty of other food being eaten in our house other than the meals listed.
There are a number of meals repeated throughout the month. They are the kids faves, they are easy to cook, and importantly for me at the moment, I can cook them in bulk. There is a lot of weightlifting and exercise happening from all of the kids and that means a lot of eating, which means lots of cooking for me! I am to make this as easy as I can for myself and minimise my time in the kitchen. These meals help me do that.
The meals are all really simple. There is nothing fancy in the plans at all. So many times when I have aimed for fancy, I find it challenging to cook the meal and if it isn’t received well, I find it frustrating. It ends up being a bad experience all around. If I want to try new things, I usually try it on the weekend as an additional meal or when I have plenty of left overs. All I then ask of the kids is for them to try it. If they don’t like it they can eat something else.
Having taught menu planning to hundreds of women, these are the common pitfalls I see people making:
They choose complicated recipes - it is easy to do this when you are flicking through magazines or your saved recipe folder in your bookmarks.
They choose too many new recipes - this requires too much thought at dinner time. This is a time when our patience and ability to focus is limited and if we can cook something without having to follow a recipe, this makes it much more achieveable.
They feel they have to have 100% variety all the time - the kids really don’t expect this and it is so hard to do.
They don’t have a non-planned meal when starting when starting you really need this flexibility. If you decide to eat out, or just don’t feel like cooking a meal and want to serve up eggs on toast one night, you don’t have food wastage. If you are menu planning but wasting food, you will not see the full gains of menu planning.
These are all well-intentioned but the end result is that they are making the task, of feeding the family harder for themselves. Once it begins to feel hard, there is resistance to doing it and so the menu planning habit is short-lived. Like any habit, menu planning gets easier the more you do it and you will notice more benefits like:
You will become quicker at it
You can involve the rest of the family and delegate tasks
You can recycle menu plans, so save stacks of time
You will love not visiting the supermarket so much
You will love how much mental energy you free up across your days not thinking about what to cook for dinner.
You can check out my Sept menu plans, with shopping lists you can download here to see examples of some basic but very easy menu planning. If you would like to use blank templates and follow my simple process to create your own, you can find them to freely download here and my step by step process.
If you give menu planning a go, let me know how you went in the comments, I would love to hear!
Adapt Drinks Sample Packs are back!
As noted above, I broke my computer earlier in the week and was without it for 24 hours. Without being able to work on what I had planned for Monday, I thought I would spend the time making up sample packs that many of you had been requesting.
So for those of you who were keen to buy a sample pack to taste Adapt Drinks or wanted to buy a sample pack as a gift for someone, now is the time to buy! Last time they sold out super quickly and I will not be making any more sample packs this year. I highly recommend getting in quick - click here to place your order.
If you are buying a sample pack as a gift and would like me to write a personalised note, please send me an email with your order number and what you would like the note to read and I am happy to write it up! Just hit reply to the email you get confirming your order and it will get to me.
Any questions just hit reply to this email and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
Nic