Menu planning with rice dishes
A number of my previous blogs have talked about menu planning and reducing food waste. In this blog I will provide a bit more detail about the system I use when planning our weekly meals.
Just as a reminder, my system is to select a different meal from the following main categories: pasta, rice, seafood, seasonal, takeaway-style (fun), light meal (eg. soup or salad), and one other meal which could be another from the main categories, or something completely new or different.
In my last blog, I used the pasta meal as the example for menu planning. In this blog, I’ll explore the rice meal concept.
Rice meals
I love rice. I’d eat it several times a week, but this gets boring for my husband apparently. So now we have it once a week, and it’s often the meal I look forward to the most! Using my system, you can use any recipes that you love, but to give you some ideas, these are the rice dishes that I love.
The first is a curry which I serve with rice. We usually have this about once a month, and I do it in bulk and save half so it it is very economical and saves time. You can read about it here.
The second is fried rice – which I love, and I schedule this with a roast pork as the ‘other’ meal, and use the leftover roast pork in the fried rice to make it more interesting. And when I say ‘I’, actually I mean my husband because he makes both the roast pork and the fried rice. Working full time and managing to deliver a roast is a tricky business, so my husband learnt how to make an amazing roast dinner, and I come home from work and make the gravy and get all the credit with my kids for making an amazing dinner!
We also enjoy a stir fry with rice, so I schedule one or two of these each month. The stir fry category is enormous and you can do whatever you want, but we tend to go for beef and broccoli stir fry, or sometimes seafood like this one.
The final rice dish that we enjoy is risotto. Like the stir fry, there are heaps and heaps of different risotto recipes you can try, or you can perfect just one and have it once a month.
Variety is the spice of life
Using this system, this means that once a month we have a curry with rice, a risotto, fried rice, and so on. Sometimes it does feel like a long wait until I get my husband’s delicious fried rice, but it gives us so much variety, as well as different flavours and cuisines. Better yet, we’re traversing the globe with Asian, European, and Indian.
If’ you’re like me and have several curry recipes, and several risotto recipes, and about a million stir fry recipes, you can actually go for months before you repeat a recipe. I know that some families love having the same meals, which is great, but if you’re like my family and crave a lot of variety, this is a very simple way to achieve this. It does mean that I have a lot of supplies in my spice cupboard, but I can’t see a problem with that!
