Fibernie's guide to meal planning.

Hello, Fibernie here. Aitch asked me to do this, so here it is, at the risk of outing myself as an obsessive over organised freak!  I would like it to be known at this point that I do still impulse buy fancy M&S grub, and that the planning thing does fall by the wayside if we've had a busy week or if I'm not feeling up to it.  However, I'm really glad I started doing this, as it has turned out to be quite manageable once into the swing of things.  It's out of necessity really - when I went back to work after DD was born, my salary had halved, and my husband dropped to working four days a week so he could take on some of the childcare.  Budgetary restraints were in order, which meant no longer spending a large percentage of our salaries at Lord Sainsburys' emporium.

How to start

·       First of all, decide when you are going to do your plan.  Pick an evening of the week when you know you'll have time and sit down with a cuppa to get started.  It'll get easier, but prepare to spend an hour to begin with.  I always do it the night we get our veg bag.

·       Keep your staples well stocked - rice, pasta, other grains, lentils, tinned tomatoes, herbs and spices you like, frozen peas, flour, tinned beans etc etc.

·       Make a list of what you have in the house.  I divide this into, 'fridge', 'veg', 'tinned stuff', 'staples', and 'freezer'.

·       Divide your planning into 'main meals' and 'lunches'.

·       For lunches, I usually just make a selection to choose from - a list of sandwich fillings, stuff in the freezer, omelette fillings, salad veg etc.  For days before I go to work I often plan to make extra for the evening meal and take that for lunch.

·       Start with what you've got and decide what you can make with that.  For example, if you've got mince and salmon fillets in the freezer, plus rice and pasta, you can build 2 meals out of that plus what veg you have.  Once you've run out with ideas, you can plan for stuff you'll need to shop for.

·       Look for inspiration.  It's a good idea to try one new recipe a week to build up your repertoire.  I keep a ring binder in the kitchen for new recipes or bookmark online ones using del.icio.us .  BBC food site is good as you can search by ingredient.

·       You can make double quantities of freezable things, which can be used in a following week.

·       Once you've decided what to make for the week, write your shopping list.  If you're in the habit of looking for the best bargains at various places, you should be able to make separate lists according to what you buy where.

Don't forget, you can plan to have a lazy night or to eat out once in a while!  We always have a 'low cook' night on the day we both work, which usually involves something of no effort like stirring pesto into pasta or heating up some soup!

Please add your tips to the blog and think of the benefits of saving the cash.  For us it's towards a family holiday or one step closer to paying off the mortgage!