Meal Planning for Beginners - Meal Planning Week 4, step by step guide and meal ideas

Meal Planning Week 4

Meal Planning Week 4

Meal Planning Week 4 is hopefully a bit better than Meal Planning Week 3. I can’t believe I’ve already been through three weeks of Meal Planning. I thought I wouldn’t keep at it but I have and I’m so happy. 

 

Week 3 was not ideal. I’ll deal with how week 3 went a bit later on. 

 

As you know by now, if you’ve be following the series,  The original inspiration for Meal Planning came from a great guest post on meal planning on the site. If you haven’t you can follow my trials and tribulations in Meal Planning Week 2 and Meal Planning Week 3.

 

The reason I’m writing about this is because I’m trying to hold myself accountable and to show those who are interested in attempting Meal Planning that if I can work my way through it, so can you

 

 

What happened in Week 3

 

So last week’s meal wasn’t great because I got sick. I was only dysfunctional for one night, two days but it did impact the whole week. You know how mum’s aren’t meant to get sick, how everything is meant to keep on going? Well it turns out when you do get ill, everything gets affected.  

 

Success in anything means preparing, planning and then being adaptable. 

 

I didn’t want to adapt. I wanted the week to go as I planned because I didn’t want this to be the start of the end. It’s so easy in the early days of planning to give up because of a few bad days. I was not going to let me feeling ill derail the Meal Planning. 

 

But then, day two and three were a mess and I felt worn out from the night before and had no inclination to eat what as planned so the plan had to change. 

 

Disaster. 

 

Again, I only focused on only doing 5 meals. I’m keen to expand to doing a full 7 day plan but  I’m not there yet. 

 

You can read last week’s post over here Meal Planning 3. 

 

Meal Planning 101 a step by step guide with meal ideas

 

What I learnt from last week 

1. It is okay to adapt. As soon as you can, get back to the plan so that you don’t get lost. 

2. With Meal Planning you shop less and that means that you also may run out of some of your staples and have no reason to go shopping other than to get that one thing. For us, this happened with bread. Come Wednesday we had no bread in the house. So I need to remember to get extra bread and extra milk, I haven’t worked out how to keep bread fresh – maybe the actual answer is eating less bread. 

3. It is okay to buy other things that you see on special otherwise your freezer will run out. 

 

 

Meal Planning Week 4: This week’s plan 

 

Step 1: Working out our week.

 

Monday and Thursday is child free day. This means I can get to the shops on these days, the butcher and the grocer without having the children moaning at me. 

 

I’m going out to dinner with some girl friends one night this week so I need to make sure whatever is planned is suitable for my husband to make. That’s a little limiting. 

 

Step 2: Check the deep freezer

 

I’m slowly running out of things in the deep freezer so this week I will be on the look out for any specials on meat. Meat is generally the most expensive element of our meals and if I can get a great discount on a roast, steak or something like that then I need to get it. 

 

Now we plan the meal 

 

 

Meal Planning Week 4: The Menu

 

So, this week we will be having:

 

Sunday

Steak on the BBQ. This was meant to be Friday but we couldn’t do it last week so have had to push it a few days. Because it’s Sunday it means we can all eat together so I’m also going to pull out some great chicken kebabs I got from the amazing butcher down the road. 

 

We’ll have baked potatoes and corn too. 

 

 

Monday

 

Beef curry. In winter it’s awesome to have a curry or a stew. I make enough so that I can freeze half for another meal.  

 

I seriously doubt that the kids will eat curry and they would have had a big lunch at daycare so I’m just going to make them noodles with butternut squares and some bacon. Buying bacon means that I can use some for bacon and cheese muffins I make later in the week for Friday’s lunch. 

 

I’m going to try  Coconut Beef Curry a recipe I adapted from Taste.com.au. 

 

Tuesday 

 

Macaroni and cheese. My husband reckons this is his speciality so he can make it without my involvement when I’m out. 

 

Wednesday

 

Cottage pie – I have pre-made mince from one of the previous week’s spaghetti bolognaise and then I just need to make the mash to go on top.

 

Thursday

 

Chicken soft shell tacos. I just need to make sure I get to the butcher for chicken (fresh chicken makes for better tacos) and the grocer lettuce. 

 

Friday

Beef burgers – easy to make and a great Friday night meal. Just need chips and a small salad. Or maybe no salad 🙂

 

For the post on Meal Planning Week 3 just click on the image below and it should take you there. 

 

Meal Planning for dummies like me

 

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