Do you plan your meals?

i no longer plan meals as i am now on my own and have some walking problems, i do online shopping and and always have a stocked freezer with ready meals and bags of cooked chicken, cupboard always has packets of bens rice and and casserole mixes along with the usual tins of beans, soup etc, my meals are easy to make and i just check what i have in before i do my next online shop.

Urms, I see you have a Greggs in the street, can you resist their yummy sausage rolls?

As a technophile I plan everything on the computer. The German Lidl has a website with lots of recipes that suit my style of cooking and our taste. They can be arranged in a plan and a shopping list is automatically generated from this. I shop once a week and stick to the plan, adding things like washing powder, tissues, milk, cheese and cereal.

I love shopping - the supermarket is the only place locally where I can browse things like CDs, clothes, stationery, etc, and that one hour per week is my "me time". The actual food shopping is quickly done because of the organised list.

Having said that, I do change the plan occasionally or we will go out for dinner. It's not kept to rigidly by any means, but I have to use up the stuff I've bought.

When DH was alive he had strict dietary needs and liked to stick to a fixed weekly plan. Now I quite enjoy being more spontaneous, though probably I eat less healthily, as some days I can’t be bothered to cook a full meal and just have a poached egg on toast. Then I realise there are veg to be eaten up! I live near Aldi so can always pick up something but I do cook from scratch, and freeze some, so there is always a portion of something in the freezer. I still tend to eat fish in Friday.

DH and I do a week each so when it is my week I start by looking in the fridge and freezer to see if anything needs using up. Then I write the meals in the desk diary so I know what to shop for. I also grow a bit of veg so using what I've grown is a priority and the rest of the meal is planned around that. We hardly ever have any food waste.

I used to plan carefully and batch cook so I always had a freezer full of meals when I worked full time and had a family.
Now I'm on my own I still only shop weekly but eat a lot of ready meals so plan more by sell by dates!
I still keep a shopping list on the go throughout the week and will obviously shop extra if the grandkids are coming over!

We plan our menu for the coming week on a Sunday. We have an Ocado shop every fortnight on a Wednesday and shop in Waitrose and/or Tesco the alternate week. I’m always comparing prices which is fairly tiring.

I 1/2 do and 1/2 dont.
I have an idea of two or three meals, and wing the rest later in the week.

I hated my childhood because I knew the =days of the week by the food on the table. Roast on a Sunday, cold meat on the Monday, stovies on Tuesday and so on.

Now I usually know about 3 days in advance so I am not shopping every day. It is not rigid unless something must be eaten that day but if I fancy a cheese omelette, fine.
I waste little.

Same here fancythat. I used to plan and stick to it, now it’s a much more flexible approach. Works for us.

I've planned a stir fry
Now I just have to cook it.

And me. If I have only 3 meals planned, we can be more flexible. I always have bought frozen pies and frozen batch cooked meals so we won't starve.

It's a lazy M&S one.
Good planning!

I plan a couple of days in advance but I'm also prepared to change it if it seems the best thing to do, ie I can't be bothered with lots of cooking so I do omelettes or similar, mostly I enjoy it but sometimes not

No but my DH does.

Meal planning seems to work for me as I am not an inspirational cook and like to know what I'm going to do each day (and maybe prep a bit in the morning).
I plan about 2/3 weeks worth of meals and try not to have repeats of each type of meat or fish each week but use different recipes. I find somehow, it save me quite a bit of money to do it this way, as well as not having to think what to do each evening!

I have always planned meals and shopped to a list though the meals may well change around during the week.

I realised that I was just using a couple of recipes from most of my cookery books, so now I have a 'book of the week'. I choose one of my books and plan meals from that for the week. I annotate the book with comments so I don't repeat one we weren't so keen on - it's fun!

Callistemon - same here - had an M&S stir-fry veg with Pad Thai style sauce - I did sneak in a couple of chicken strips.

I decide on the day. I check with my husband and he usually agrees with anything I suggest.

I have just had over 3 weeks of never repeating a main course. In these weeks we might have had different curries so things like curries repeated but not the same meat or sauce. My children remember a run we had of not repeating a pudding when they were young and it got quite mad in the end but good fun. I only cook for 2 mostly but have a big chest freezer and a fridge freezer as well so always meals cooked and frozen and yesterday was a great big pot of chicken broth portioned and frozen. I have started getting my meat from Donald Russell an Aberdeenshire butcher which is real quality meat and we can taste the difference but we do not have it too many times a week . I like at least two fish days and maybe a veggie day . Because of the recent floods I was so glad to have large stocks of all the things we need including milk and rolls. Thank goodness our rain has stopped now but shelves empty in the supermarket as they did not get any deliveries.

crazyH

Callistemon - same here - had an M&S stir-fry veg with Pad Thai style sauce - I did sneak in a couple of chicken strips.

Probably better - the beef was ok but some pieces were a bit chewy.
But very tasty.

I realised that I was just using a couple of recipes from most of my cookery books, so now I have a 'book of the week'. I choose one of my books and plan meals from that for the week. I annotate the book with comments so I don't repeat one we weren't so keen on - it's fun

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I have done this, too, as I have some lovely cookery books. But when planning, I get lazy and go online. It's a wonderful pastime though, browsing through the books and looking at the pictures.

I don`t really plan now that I am on my own. Being a family of five was very different, planning was so useful then, to provide nutritious and balanced home cooked meals

I know what is what is needed to give me optimum health. If I make a soup then it is often done in my soup maker, which makes enough soup for 4 days, which means that basic planning has been done for three days. Meal planning can be as simple as making a big all-in-one `low meat` casserole and dividing into ready meals for the freezer

Things change when widowed and meal planning is one of them, no need for it

He can you know on a Monday what you ll fancy on a Wednesday !!!

BlueBelle

He can you know on a Monday what you ll fancy on a Wednesday !!!

Indeed.

Or who will be round for meals?