Be organised & not hangry with a menu planner
Every night around dinner time, uncertainty makes cooking a chore & less enjoyable.
Or you end up spending money on home deliveries and it adds up to mega dollars by the end of the year.
Benefits of menu planning
- you’ll shop quicker
- there’ll be less food wastage
- you’ll spend less $ at the supermarket
- spend less on take-away food
- you’ll eat healthier
You know the saying, “never shop on an empty stomach” – that phrase refers to shopping at the supermarket.
Imagine browsing Menulog, Ubereats etc on an empty stomach. You may buy more than you need which means more wasted food & money.
How to use a menu planner
Seriously easy: Spend half hour on shopping day over your morning cuppa planning 7 days worth of dinners.
I like to mix it up and add some vegetarian meals, fish, poultry, pork & beef dishes. You do you.
Then add all the required ingredients on the shopping list for that day.
Meal ideas
If you don’t have many recipe books and you’re always looking recipes up online – start collecting those free recipe magazines from the supermarket. Rip out the pages you want try, keep the ones that are a success and start adding them to a folder. It needn’t cost you anything. Eventually you’ll need to level up and have an organised system for all your recipes, in that case you can check out my blog post on how I do it. I have been using this system for over 15 years.
Where to buy a menu planner
I have combined menu planner / shopping list notebooks that are small enough to bring shopping with you.
A pack of 4 sees you through 12 months. I also have them available with a leather cover – see below:
