Menu planning is one of the first steps to optimizing your lifestyle and budget. Foreign systems, for example, FlyLady, lucidly describe the advantages of weekly planning, but our compatriots do not seek to simplify their lives, preferring the usual way. “Planning a week ahead is boring, long, difficult and pointless - you still have to buy semi-finished products at the last moment. My husband will not eat it,”say the post-Soviet housewives, who have swollen with fat on their favorite pasta and dumplings. This article will convince you otherwise, ladies and gentlemen, and will also help you put together your first menu.
Why plan a menu?
- To cook with pleasure.
- So that the necessary products are always at home in the right amount.
- For the family to eat healthy and fresh food.
- In order not to overeat.
- To optimize food costs.
Step-by-step menu planning for the whole family
- List your favorite foods and homemade meals and choose from them those that can be prepared often without high costs.
- Make a list of 3-5 breakfasts, lunches and dinners. If you are used to dining out, estimate the amount of your daily expenses. Over time, you will become accustomed to taking lunch with you, but for beginners, this is a rather difficult step.
- Pick a new easy recipe to try out over the weekend.
- Write down all the necessary ingredients for the preparation of the selected for the week. Check what supplies you already have and which ones need to be purchased. Optimize your recipes according to the seasonal availability of the food.
- Be sure to budget for healthy snacks - fruits, berries, seeds, and nuts - as well as the daily costs of bread and dairy products.
- Hang the menu on the fridge and enjoy an organized life!
Tips for beginners to save stress
- When composing your first menu, forget about perfectionism and send culinary sites away. Use your familiar recipes without trying to beat the best restaurants in town. If you really love to cook with new recipes, introduce no more than one or two meals a week.
- To quickly compose a menu, divide the sheet into three columns. Enter groceries in the first, meat, poultry or fish in the second, vegetables and additional ingredients in the third. This tip will allow you to combine the same foods into new dishes.
- Instead of buying exotic imported foods, diversify the way you prepare your familiar ingredients. Porridge can be cooked in water, milk and broth, on the stove, in pots, in a slow cooker and in a microwave oven. Porridge is not bad in itself, but you can diversify it by adding pieces of vegetables, mushrooms, roots. A variety of gravies and sauces will also make your everyday menu more interesting.
- At first, it will be difficult for you to get rid of junk food - sausages, small sausages, canned food, chips, candy, food to order, packaged juices and soda. However, by minimizing the consumption of such products up to once a week, and then a month, you will save not only your family budget, but also your health. You will learn to cook semi-finished products yourself from ingredients you know, as well as pay attention to the composition and quality of products that you buy in supermarkets and markets.
Personal experience
Milk porridge, omelets and sandwiches are great for breakfast. If there is absolutely no time to cook (my darling and I often stay up late at work), you can have a glass of protein shake or have a snack with fruit (2 apples or a banana is a great breakfast for those who follow the figure).
Lunch and dinner are often the same - I spied this technique in the book "90 Days of Separate Meals". This method allows you to spend less time on cooking. Portions for dinner are half the size of those for lunch. I cook soups twice a week, the rest of the time I combine side dishes with meat, chicken or fish. The most popular dishes for lunch and dinner are chili, baked chicken legs with porridge, spaghetti with chops, Japanese curry, vegetable stews, chicken broths with noodles.
In addition to hot dishes, for lunch and dinner, I definitely prepare a salad of fresh seasonal vegetables. No complicated recipes needed: the fewer ingredients the better. In winter, pickles go well: sauerkraut, Korean salads (of course, homemade), in spring - chopped greens with a hard-boiled egg, in autumn - radish and pumpkin.
We snack on either fruit or tea. Once a week I bake some simple muffins or fry pancakes.
I want to note that in a year of using such a system, I got rid of 15 kg with minimal physical exertion and was finally able to move to the city of my dreams. If I succeeded, a fat woman without higher education, then you will succeed all the more.
