Meal Planning; first attempt (Week 3)

So who knew that meal planning could save your life? I mean, no kidding, it will help you save money, save time, lose weight AND be super healthy, plus make your children extra intelligent, polite and mega sleep monsters. OK, I exaggerate a wee bit…

But seriously though, I do need to lose weight, I do need to save money on my grocery shopping and I do need to be a bit more organised in general, but in the kitchen particularly. Especially now I have a play coming up, with rehearsals and everything, meaning that I do have to have some food ready to throw on to the table once I pick the kids up from after school club. (Not literally.)

Of course in this day and age, no one needs to be on their own with a new venture. Frick’s sake, we got the goddamn innernet to do all our work for us! I like to think I did meal planning already, with humanly mixed results, but of course the innernet is there to tell me how to do it. Good Housekeeping has pages and pages of recipe ideas but no templates (or at least I can’t find them). Netmums comes out on top as it has both blank templates and completed ones (either proving impractical for my purposes, but whatevs, you’ve got to start somewhere) plus a tonne of advice. Even the blinking NHS gets in on the act! Then it all gets a bit gah and dull so I just start putting pen to paper and this is the result:

Day	Plan	Reality	Excuse/Reason
Monday	Fishcakes, homemade (at Oscar’s request).	Fish and Chips (from John Dory’s)	I’m late home from an Equity meeting. I’ve planned so well that I forgot to eat lunch and so I am starving. We eat at 5pm.
Tuesday	Home made burgers	Lamb Chops	We are home later from swimming than I thought, but no matter as I’ve been to the butchers! I only buy 4 lamb chops because you never know with the kids but evidently, this is nowhere near enough. On this epic night, Oscar eats 2 chops, fried potatoes, half a sweetcorn cob, broccoli, gravy, half a punnet of strawberries with yoghurt, a banana and, finally, a plum. Who knew? Last Sunday he ate 4 slices of Veda bread all day. Bladdy kids.
Wednesday	Lasagne	Pasta Pesto	We took Sasha for a walk today (cousin Jayne’s gorgeous Weimeraner). Smug me thought we’d be back by 4pm, plenty of time to make lasagne, or even yesterday’s burgers. No. We are barely home by 5pm and have to leave at 5.45pm to get to Oscar’s first Squirrels at 6pm. Pasta pesto – with mascarpone, cheddar and ketchup to make it proper gourmet like.
Thursday	Spag Bol!	Spag Bol!	I make Spag Bol! From scratch! In the hour between brunch with the girls and school pick up. Thursdays are mad because I have arranged 2 x BYT drama club, rush hour traffic home and then Beavers. Meal planning is key! Cousin Wendy texts; would we like to drop in for spag bol before giving Hannah a lift? Sure! Mine can go in the freezer. On the way home in the car I ask the kids what they had for lunch. The answer? Spag bol. Of course.
Friday	??	Ribs	It’s time to eat the radioactively orange mega fatty pork ‘ribs’ I bought from the butchers on Monday. They take an age to cook. The kids wolf them down. Nothing left for me. Probably not a bad thing.
Saturday	Oh FFS who gets this far? And btw fyi, most online plans don’t even include weekends, so there.
Sunday	Um, whatevs.		Roast chicken. Hallelujah.