Meal Planning
Meal planning is deciding your meals in advance using your schedule, preferences, foods on hand and budget to create a menu of meals while only purchasing the necessary ingredients from your local grocery store. I meal plan to cut down costs, time spent in the kitchen and waste of ingredients. Meal planning allows me to quickly make delicious meals and use those leftovers for my lunch for the next day. Here is how I meal plan for the week. Feel free to adopt this method or adjust it to fit your own needs.
Calendar Set-Up
First, set up your calendar. I like Google calendar because it allows me to share the meal plan with other house hold members. I can also repeat the 'event' created so that I am not re-creating an 'event' every time I want to meal plan. I create a meal plan 'event' for every day of the week and fill out the consistencies. For example; everyday I will have leftovers for lunch, a banana, yogurt cup, popcorn and some chocolate. I'm at the point now where I don't include the snacks anymore but it helps if you are just begining.
Mondays I usually make a bowl for dinner, Tuesdays a pasta dish, Wednesday a stir-fry dish, Thursday are a quick meal (such as soup as I go to rehearsals that day), Fridays a pizza or sandwich, Saturdays a different entree and Sundays I go to my parents for dinner. When details in the event are created, ensure you click 'repeat weekly'
Edit: Recently, to avoid food waste, I will dedicate each week to a type of 'cuisine'. One week I may focus on having only Mediterranean dishes so that if I purchase Feta cheese and Tzatziki, I use it up for the other Mediterranean dishes for that week before it goes bad. Other cuisines I rotate through are Spanish or Mexican, Middle Eastern, European or Italian, Asian and Western.
Weekly Meal Planning
Once your calendar is set-up, you are ready to plan your meals for the week. Click on the event you want to plan for and edit the event. Monday's I like to make a bowl dish, so I will look through the category 'bowls' on the blog and choose a recipe I want to make. I try and choose one that will use up ingredients I have already. I type in the name of the recipe on the event and save it. If the recipe calls for any ingredients I don't have, I add it to my grocery list. The beautiful thing with Google calendar is it connects to Google keep which is a note taking app by Google that can also be shared with other people. I edit the list directly in Google calendar on the side bar and my partner is immediately able to see the edits. This is amazing because, so long as I have the ingredients added into the list, he can pick it up on the way home from work.