Meal Plan Monday #48

Happy Monday! Although, how is it Monday again so soon!? However, starting today is going to be a different kind of normal for us. I am now at home working, plus both boys are with me as the schools are shut. It’s definitely going to be a period of adjustment! I do have a schedule of sorts worked out, but I am going to ry and go with the flow a bit too. A four year old and a two year old confined is going to be tricky, but we’ll all have to adapt. She says! I feel a bit strange about it all; sad that I’m not at work and worried about how the next few weeks are going to go.

Monday means another meal plan post which just goes through what we are eating this week so keep our food spends under budget. I have definitely honed my skills in this area for a long time now – and have even written a course about it here – so we have very little food waste and our meal plans are cheap and tasty I spent just under £50 this week for a family of four. I tried to get some extra things for the freezer this week but it was like an apocalypse had happened at our local Morrisons. There was nothing in certain parts of the shop! It was a bit stressful, if I’m honest. I track all of our spending in my March budget planner, to make sure I stay under budget, including on food.

One of the only things I am missing on my No Spend Year so far is my takeaway coffee. I have been making it at home – I love having oat milk in my coffee – but it’s not quite the same. Having said that, the longer it goes without it, the easier it becomes. I might not say this when I get to month six, but so far, so good. Although, there have been bigger things to worry about this week so maybe it’s not a problem in the grand scheme of things.

This week’s meal plan looks like this:

Monday – chicken curry + rice

Tuesday – smoked salmon tagliatelle

Wednesday – slow cooker Bolognese

Thursday – spaghetti puttanesca

Friday – pizza + salad 🙂

Saturday – baked salmon, veg and hollandaise sauce

I do our food shop on a Sunday so I haven’t thought about what we will eat on Sunday. But I’m looking forward to the meals this week. Both boys will eat the same as us all week as well which helps. I love it when we can all eat the same meals together plus it makes it a lot easier as I only have to think about one meal rather than different things. We do tend to eat similar things week in week out. Do you do that? Guess I’m a creature of habit! If you have any favourite budget recipes you can suggest, I’d be grateful!

It will be a bit different in the fact that we’ll be eating all meals at home, every day. Can’t remember the last time that happened! So I need to ration the snacks 😉 I can see that I might need to up our grocery budget a bit going forward, as we are clearly going to eat more being at home. Breakfasts are straightforward as we tend to eat the same, but lunches might need to be more varied. We shall see. It depends on what I can get in the shops, to be honest. I can see lots of baking in the future – our favourite being lemon drizzle cake.

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Part of our planning and budget for food means that some items are used from our stockpile every week. This is so the food we already have in the cupboards is used regularly and rotated so nothing goes to waste, but it’s also a good habit to get in to so that if we cannot get to the shops for whatever reason, I can make meals from what we already have in the cupboards. I’m using quite a few things from the freezer this week, which also keeps costs down. Plus pizza night is always a cheap one – I just get a big frozen one from the supermarket and it does all four of us. I’m going to make a big batch of bolognese sauce in the slow cooker and then freezer it into portions. I can then either use it for spaghetti bolognese in the future or in a lasagne.

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What are you eating this week? Trying anything new? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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