Meal planning is something that you either love or hate and for me it depends how I’m feeling. If I’ve got a new recipe book or something in mind that I’m dying to make, I love it! But, when I’m feeling a bit uninspired it can feel like a drag. We switch between meal prep boxes such as Hello Fresh and Gousto and weekly meal plans of our own ideas or classic meals we’ve been making for years. I’ve linked some of my favourite Gousto recipes in my lockdown fun blog post.
We always have different meals but of course there’s always a classic pesto pasta or a chilli knocking around as an easy option! We won’t have the same meal two weeks in a row usually as we like to mix things up. But for those times when you are meal planning sometimes you want to shop your own store cupboard stash and freezer and create a meal plan out of what you already have kicking about in your kitchen. This can involve literally not grocery shopping at all or simply grabbing a couple of fresh vegetables and some fruit to top up your stocks.
This ‘shopping your kitchen’ method of meal planning is perfect for if you’re in any of the following situations;
- Using everything up if you’re moving house
- Defrosting your freezer
- Wanting to have a ‘cheap’ week of meals and reserve your food budget
- Not wanting to go to the shops much (a.k.a in a global pandemic – not something we all hope will ever happen again in our lifetime!)
- Clearing out freezer and cupboards for a ‘clean slate’
A usual food shopping week for us can be anything from £40 – £60 including a meal prep box or a full ‘big shop’ but if we shop our own kitchen we can spend around £10 grabbing milk, fresh bread and some fresh vegetables like broccoli and some blueberries for snacks and breakfast – we prefer this fresh from the local market and is really good value. For example, we popped down yesterday to grab some fruit and spent £4.20 on 10 pink lady apples, a bunch of bananas, two punnets of blueberries and some grapes.
The benefits of meal planning from your store cupboards and freezer are;
- Low food waste
- Budget-friendly
- Flexing those creative muscles!
- Not having much to move if you’re in the house move situation
How to plan meals to use everything up
This answers the questions of ‘how to plan a week of cheap meals’ too if you already have things in your cupboard!
- Take a trip to the ol’ supermarket of your kitchen and take a notebook and pen too. Make a list of everything you have that you can make a meal out of. For example your cupboard and freezer lists might look a little like this…
- Check out your fridge too – you might have a red pepper from last week’s shop rolling around in the veg drawer or some onions that need using up, some soy sauce you’d forgotten about or some harissa paste you bought for a recipe once. You’ll probably have some sort of milk and butter or spread as well.
- Mix and match ingredients and see what recipes you can create for breakfast, lunches and dinners. In our fridge we always have a bit of cheese hanging about and we had some random frozen avocado too so one of our meals was mince, chopped tomatoes, kidney beans, red pepper and spices for chilli paired with some rice, avocado and grated cheese.
- Don’t forget to check out your seasonings and condiments such as chutneys, sauces, pastes and mustards. I added mustard into my cauliflower cheese and tuna pasta bake which both used plain flour from the cupboard, cheese and milk from the fridge and low-fat spread which we always have in for sandwiches, toast etc.
- Start a plan. Write down each day of the week that you want to eat your stocks for and see if there’s anything you may need to pop to the shops for. Of course, heading to the shops for fresh milk and a loaf of bread may be needed. We popped to the shops during our ‘eating up’ week and picked up some broccoli, milk, bread and another red pepper to bolster some meals but of course we didn’t need to do a ‘big shop’! This kind of week is always great to use a Clubcard voucher or coupons to make things extra cheap and to make you feel extra smug.
An example plan for evening meals, and what we actually ate from our cupboard/freezer/fridge this week, could be:
I hope this is helpful and you could get some ideas for some cheaper meals or how to use up the contents of the back of your cupboard and freezer!
Click here for £20 off your first Hello Fresh box and I’ll also get £20 credit.
Get 35% off your first two Gousto boxes here too and I’ll get £10 credit.
