A whole new approach to meal planning

Do you plan your meals?

I know for some people, the very thought of planning a whole week's worth of dinners would just be ridiculous. I mean, it's monday, how do you know what you'll want to eat on thursday?

For us, though, it works. It has to really, we all work shifts, the kids have various clubs and things, it would be total chaos if we didn't have some kind of plan.

I need to know what we plan to eat that week, it just helps me to know what I need to take out of the freezer, and it saves us from wasting good food. It's also helpful when you're trying to eat healthily, you're less tempted to get a takeaway if there's already all the ingredients for a nice meal ready to go.

How to plan your meals though? People have lots of different ways - some use spreadsheets, some use just a scrap of paper, some use a whiteboard. For some people it may be just a list of simple oven dinners, for others it might be a series of elaborate recipes! Whatever works for you.

This is my meal planner...

It's a hardback, A4 sized notebook, with a ribbon for keeping your page. I like using a dedicated book because as the year goes on, it acts as a sort of kitchen diary, you can look back and remember what you've been eating.

How many times have you made something delicious and thought "I must make this again sometime", only to completely forget what you made or how you made it? This way, I can remember what we had and when.

I also write in the book and page number if it's from a cookbook. When you own over 200 cookbooks, it's easy to forget where a good recipe came from!

See those gold stars? That's for recipes which have been a success. My kids are very fussy, I really struggle to find dinners that they will both eat and enjoy, so if they've liked something, it gets a gold star.

This helps with planning future meals - I can flick through the book and see at a glance which meals are likely to go down well. Again, because I write down books and page numbers, it's easy to go straight to the right recipe.

How do I get to the planning stage in the first place? I'm pretty organised about food. All my tins are on one shelf, spices on another, jars on another, etc. I buy meat in bulk, so the freezer is pretty much always stocked with things like mince, chicken and stewing steak.

I always have a good supply of stuff like tinned tomatoes, beans, various spices etc, so I can make any number of meals.

Once a week, I look at what I have, what we're all doing that week and what needs using up, and base my meals around that. I'll flick through a few cookbooks for inspiration, and include a few gold star meals from previous weeks.

I tend to use post its on my cookbooks to mark pages of things I want to try, so I'll usually try to include one or two new recipes a week.

It's good to have a plan. I like being able to look in the book before I go to bed and know what to take out of the freezer for the next day. I like the fact that I no longer do that dazed wander in the supermarket, mind blank, desperately trying to think of what I need. I know what we're eating, I know what's in the house, and I know what needs to be bought. Job done.