Variety and ease – why I plan my menus

Before I started menu planning I found it hard to consistently come up with new ideas for dinner, and quite often just opted for easier recipes that everyone loved. However, I found that we would soon get bored with these meals, and I would eventually be back at the same problem of having to come up with new ideas.

The obvious answer was to plan menus, which also coincided nicely with my goal to reduce household food waste which I blogged about here. Since I started menu planning, I’ve developed a simple system that makes menu planning much easier, and the result is a lot more variety in our meals. The system is pretty simple, and it really is just a way of thinking.

The basics

So, just think for a minute – how many pasta dishes could you cook without a recipe? And how many dishes with rice? I have about three or four of each that I could regularly cook. Then I have a couple of meat and vegetable / salad combinations that we often have, and we also love seafood so I have a few seafood dishes that I make. But we also like fun foods like the takeaway style food – hamburgers, pizzas etc.

And another thing I love is cooking to the season – so in summer I love lighter meals with fresher tastes, and in winter I like stews and pies.

Once I started thinking like this, I realised that I could create a menu list around this. I decided on the following each week:

• 1 pasta dish
• 1 rice dish, or meal containing rice
• 1 ‘takeaway’ style meal (or something that involves using your hands – keeps the littlies interested)
• 1 seafood meal
• 1 seasonal meal
• 1 light meal (salad in summer, soup in winter)
• 1 ‘other’ meal – maybe a new recipe, maybe something we haven’t had in a while, or just a simple meat and vegetable / salad meal

Because I have three or four pasta meals that are really quick to make and I can do them without thinking, this meant we only ate each one once a month. This felt like we had a massive variety of food, and no one was getting bored.

The other bonus of this system was that scheduling the pasta, rice, takeaway and seafood meals was quick – I just cycle through the three or four regular pasta meals each week, and I barely have to think about it. Then I spend a few minutes choosing the seasonal dish, and usually I just ask my family what they want for the ‘other’ meal.

Putting it together

To give you an example – I’ve blogged about fennel pasta, carbonara and broccoli pesto pasta. These are my three ‘go to’ pasta recipes. Week 1 the pasta dish will be fennel pasta (which I make in bulk and freeze), week 2 will be carbonara, and week 3 will be broccoli pesto pasta. I can always try a new pasta if I like, or I simply go back to the fennel pasta and start again at week 1. The good thing is it’s already in the freezer, I just have to cook it – winning!

I’ve been using this system for over a year now, and I find it’s cheaper, quicker and much less stress because I don’t spend too much time trying to think of what to cook – I encourage you to give it a go!