2023 Week 47: Meal Planning

I've been trying out meal planning. Being human, and therefore horribly disorganised with groceries, I sometimes think of things to cook but realise I don't have 1 or 2 key ingredients. Here is my attempt to resolve this using a Google Sheet.

The bottom half lists the ingredients we have at home. The top half is stuff we can make. The 2 bits feed (ha) into each other: I generate meal ideas by looking at what we have - and I get groceries based on what we need from the future meal list. This reduces food wastage too since I shouldn't buy any ingredients that we don't have an immediate purpose for. 

There is a preponderance of mincemeat recipes because we accidentally got sent 4 bags of the stuff in our last Redmart order.

The results so far. Not a single instant noodle meal!

1. Yakiniku beef rice

Shabu2 beef slices marinated in Donki sauce. Stir fried bean sprouts with garlic.

2. Taco rice bowl

Minced pork w/ Woolworths taco seasoning packet, pico de gallo from a jar, sour yogurt.

3. Chili

Recycled leftover taco meat with cannellini beans, peppers, onions, pasta sauce. With side salad and nachos and more yogurt.

4. Wafu pasta

Mushrooms, hot dogs, garlic sauteed and mixed with spaghetti, soy sauce, mirin and butter. This was an insanely cheap recipe - less than $8 to make 4 servings.

5. Chicken macaroni soup

Forgot to take a picture. This made me sick, I think because I pre-fried the mirepoix and left it in the fridge for too many days. 

6. Quesadillas

Leftover chicken - hopefully untainted - with pasta sauce and shredded cheese for quesadillas. We made a third one with onion jam and brie after running out of shredded cheese - that was especially good. Onions rock.

The next two are lunch provisions for myself:

7. Arroz y frijoles

Rice, canned beans, jarred salsa, avocado, yogurt. The lack of leafy veg is disturbing, but otherwise, I can probably eat this every day...

8. Picnic lunch

My favourite kind of lunch - bread, tuna, tomatoes, cucumber, boiled egg, cheese, grapes, apple, cashews.

I felt kinda overwhelmed at the start of the week. It's not so much the bunny boarding so much as getting texts and calls at all hours from potential customers. Objectively speaking, nothing wrong with that. But my desire to please and accommodate kicks in and I feel imposed upon.

After talking to Jon about it, we decided to change the first point of contact to him. He is impervious where I am weak, so is a better fit for enquiries. So far I am extremely happy about it - we'll see how he feels about it.

After settling that issue our lives settled into a more stable routine. Feed bunnies in the morning, go for a walk or bike ride, make lunch, go to work, make dinner, read/watch telly. Watched King Rocker and finished Emma. (Yay, that's all 6 Austen novels!)