concrete_kid's Profile

Great post. I tend to do as much of the cooking/prepping the day before. There are so many things that can be cooked and warmed through when needed. If anything can't be fully cooked the day before I will do all the prepping so I only have to throw it together on the day. This also helps if you have forgotten a vital ingredient because you have the time to go out and buy it.

I also lay the table the night before, iron my clothes, do the final house clean. It means I can go to bed without that feeling of dread that there is so much to do the next day.

As a recent convert to meal planning i'm slightly obsessed, I've saved a huge amount since i've started. Here's the way I do it.

The evening before market day is spent reading through recipe books deciding what to cook for every meal. I take a piece of paper and on the left hand side I write the days of the week, next to this I write what I plan to eat, leaving blank meals I'll be eating out. As I right down each meal on the right hand side I start righting the shopping list, this helps me to miss that vital ingredients.

Once I've done the shopping I cook enough food to last around 3-4 days (this usually includes a few lunches and breakfasts), freezing any extra portions and generally roasting off lots of veg. I also marinade a few different meats which I then cook on the 3rd or 4th or day or freeze if i don't think I'll have time to cook it or it won't last. I also roast another lot of veg.

Doing it this way means I only cook a couple of days a week but always have something lovely to eat, or something that just needs to be thrown in the oven. It's made things so much easier and also means If I want to cook a fancy desert it's not such a drag as dinner is always pretty much sorted.

I'm so glad somebody has come up with this idea, I onced worked in a Japanese restaurant and was horrified at the amount of chopsticks that were thrown away, a good proportion of which were clean.

I love it. Every house should have one room that is slightly crazy, would be great to have one zany room in an otherwise monochrome house. I'm off to buy some pink paint!