I’ve said it before, we try our best to plan out what we eat in the week. It means we spend less money on food, we eat better and on days where I’m short on time (like if i’m going to the gym, or have to run errands after work) we can plan on having easy to cook meals that still taste good. I also get an organic box of vegetables most Thursday, so I always keep that in mind.

This is how I plan out food:

1. What do I have at home?

If there’s any left over vegetables that I need to use up I remember those when planning. We try to not throw away any food, but sometimes something gets left in the back of the fridge until it’s waaaay past its expiry date. We try to combat this the best we can. I’ll also take note of what we have in the pantry; do we have quinoa, rice, noodles, pasta, canned beans, seitan..?

2. Where’s the recipe..?

If there are any recipes from food blogs I want to try out I try to remember which ones. I get out my favourite cookbooks, or the ones I haven’t used in a while. I check the starred items in my Google Reader. If there are recipes there that mean that I don’t have to buy a tonne of ingredients, they go on a preliminary list in my head.

3. Are there any common ingredients in my recipes?

If there are, gooo me! I don’t want to buy a bunch of celery and end up using only one stalk. What a waste of money that’d be.

4. Brainstorm!

What do I want, when do I want it, will the lettuce still look good on wednesday? Did Alex mention anything he really wanted (meaning; do I have to make wingz this week?)

5. Make the list.

What days am I working? Shall we make cooked breakfast on any of the days? When am I going to go to the gym? Are we doing anything special this week? I sit down, write down the days and what we’re doing on them and then start planning out what meal goes where. I also write down anything special that might affect our week plan and if there’s anything else I’ll be making that I have to buy ingredients for.

After all of that I write down what ingredients we need to buy, think out what we need for breakfasts and lunches and compile it all into a neatly sorted list. Vegetables in one section, fruit in another, soy milk and yoghurt in one.. and so on. We usually go to the same store so the list tends to be written in what order we go through the store (frozen items last).

Here’s this weeks list!

All of this list organising is pretty funny considering I’m not a very organised person usually. Woah!