Three golden rules for meal planning.
Want to get the most out of your meal times with your family? Decrease your stress around preparing and cooking food? And save yourself time and money? Meal planning is the answer! Whether for a week or a month ahead, planning your meals will change the way you approach preparing your family’s food for the better.
Planning your meals ahead of time means you can provide yourself and your family with a balanced spread with enough variety to keep everyone happy and interested, without wasting precious time or ingredients. You can read more about the reasons why meal planning is so useful and important in our previous blog post here. Ready to start? Let us share our top three guidelines for successful meal planning.
Three golden rules for meal planning:
1. Keep it straight and simple. Plan out four or five meals for the week, leaving a night for leftovers or frozen meals or even take-out (you can serve it up to look its best). Make sure that you choose to make meals that the whole family can enjoy and that you make enough so that you can use for your leftovers night. Simple doesn’t have to be boring and, with a little creativity, you can switch up leftovers with different ingredients to make a different meal.
2. Double up, triple up. Take a favourite recipe and make more of it. Eat a portion for dinner this week and then freeze the rest for use at a later date. Meatballs, lasagne (with a few twists come serving time), and soups are good options and they’re easy to store and thaw well.
3. Be fine with being flexible. While you might have your meal plan in place, not every day is going to go as planned. You might be running late at work or have a sick child or forget to thaw a vital ingredient. Don’t panic – simply swop out your intended meal for a different one on the meal planner. Having some basic staples in stock (such as eggs or pasta sauce) can make for the perfect back up plan when things go awry on the food front.
Planning right, splitting meals and making a decision to go with frozen meals are the keys to successful meal planning. Need a frozen food option you can trust? Something that’s quick and easy but still nutritious and delicious? Your favourite catering company has the answer! If you love a Food Matters meal, you’ll be happy to hear that we’ve recently launched our very own range of frozen meals – FOMO. Simply order online and take home a range of yummy meals for your freezer or tomorrow’s supper. When you don’t feel like cooking but still want to eat well, try a FOMO meal!