Today I want to talk about what we’ve been eating lately, and a bit about our current menu planning method; how we decide what meals to have each week. We’ve been trying to involve the kids in cooking, and to be more organized and orderly in the way we plan our meals. I often prefer to just decide on the spur of the moment what to cook, but obviously that’s not very time effective, so it’s good when life is busy.
So, at the beginning of the year, I made a master plan for our meals, and now each week we take that and set up our weekly meal plan from it. I involve the kids in this because they’re doing a lot of the cooking and helping as well. We have two young adults living at home, two teenagers, and an almost-12-year-old. They’re able to help quite a lot, which is great because it’s a big family to cook for.
So, we have our weekly schedule, where we know often we’re going to have a date night for mom and dad on a Tuesday evening, and then kids have meat pie. Then we have one day where one of the kids often goes out on a ticket reward with mom or dad. On Friday night, we know that we’ll have a relaxed evening, usually with pizza. There’s a sort of a structure to the week, and we just fill that in with some specifics. I have a spreadsheet that’s got the days of the week, who’s going to be cooking for lunch and for dinner, and who’s the helper.
I have some options for meals and sides. If I don’t put in sides, then I can never think of the right ones. We have options for the details for the main meals and the sides that we can choose from, and we have the days of the week for each of those. We’ll sit together and look at that on a Sunday evening. Then I have another spreadsheet, which is my current meal plan for the week. I’ll actually print that and put it on the refrigerator door.
On a Monday for lunch, we’ll have something like tuna mayonnaise or leftovers, perhaps from the burgers or the chicken kebabs that we grilled on the weekend. One of my kids doesn’t eat tuna, so she has sardines from a tin or leftovers. Sometimes there are also leftover potatoes and other things in the fridge, and we try to just finish all the leftovers. Otherwise, we’ll do the tuna mayonnaise with some sourdough, some cucumber, tomato, avo, et cetera. One of the boys makes that up for us and the others help. Everybody always helps with setting the table and things. My oldest son is out at work, but the rest of us are here to help with that.
On Monday evening, my oldest daughter cooks. She will either make meatballs from scratch – she’ll use ground beef, and she’ll add beans, and make some rice. Then we’ll either do steamed butternut or salad to go with that. Another alternative is beef stroganoff with sour cream in there, as well as some rice, and again, salad or butternut.
Sometimes we also do roast lamb or lamb chops. We usually do those in the crockpot over time. Then they’re easy, and nice and tender. We roast the lamb for most of the day in the crockpot, and we have that with potatoes and roast vegetables, or sometimes a homemade soup.
A couple of times a week, we like to make homemade soup with broth. Our favorite is cauliflower and cheese soup, and we also like butternut and sweet potato. It’s very, very basic soup – you just have to put in the vegetables with some salt, about two cups of chicken broth, sometimes a little bit of onion, but not usually. Then there’s a little water of course, and that’s it. We just cook that and blend it up, adding some cheese if it’s the cauliflower one. That’s really delicious. We also add some cream at the end to both kinds of soup when we’re blending it up.
We’ll use that soup as the vegetables for the meal, so then we don’t need to have other vegetables on the side. That makes it a simpler meal, and it also works well if we’re doing the meals in courses. First we’ll have the soup, and then we’ll have the meat and potatoes.
So, we choose between one of those options for Monday dinner. My daughter will say, “Okay, this week I want to make meatballs”, or “This week we’re going to have roast lamb”, and then I know what to put on the shopping list. Then we put that one on the current menu. Also, on that day my second daughter will bake something like muffins made with spelt flour, some granola, some apple bars, or something like that for a snack for the week.
On a Tuesday, my youngest son, who is 17, will sometimes make some ground beef into a bolognese type tomato sauce to go with pasta. This might be tagliatelle, penne, or spaghetti. Sometimes we’ll also have pasta, usually penne, with shredded chicken and cheese sauce. So, it’ll be spaghetti bolognese with grated cheese, chicken pasta with cheese sauce, or baked potatoes with bolognese and cheese sauce – some combination of those things – or we’ll have nachos.
For nachos, we usually use mince and beans, and then we add cucumber, guacamole, grated cheese, sour cream, and salsa. Another option for a side there is carrot salad. So, he chooses one of those. Either he’ll say, “Okay, we’re going to do nachos this week”, or “Spaghetti bolognese with grated cheese”, and then we know what to put on the shopping list. That takes him about half an hour of cooking time, kind of in the middle of homeschool. Then we all help to make the sides. One of the girls will do the cucumber and the sour cream, et cetera, and another will do the guac, or one of us will do the cheese sauce. Sometimes I help with that. One of the girls does the carrot salad, and et cetera.
Tuesday night is always date night, so I’ll usually get a chicken pie, which is about the size of a dinner plate, and then a chicken curry pie. We divide up those two pies, and they’ll feed the five kids. We have them with some stir fry veg that one of the girls does on the side, or sometimes steamed corn on the cob.
Then mom and dad will have our date night meal. Sometimes we’ll cook it at home. We like to have some kind of appetizer using marrow (zucchini) and haloumi cheese. Then for the main, we’ll have something like ribs in the crockpot. Sometimes we’ll get takeout like Chinese, burgers, or something like that. That makes Tuesday evening a bit slower and more relaxed, which is a good thing because we do quite a bit of cooking on a Monday or Tuesday for our church.
The meals we’ve chosen for each day might seem a bit random, but the way we’ve decided what options to put on the master list is based on what each person can cook. We allocated one of our kids, or myself, to each particular day, depending on whether or not they’ll be out at work a lot, or if they have a lot on otherwise, or if they have time to cook that evening. They chose their evenings and then we thought about what they can cook, and we put that on the options list. That’s how we chose those options.
Then on a Wednesday, we’ll have something simple for lunch. We often get butternut soup or tomato soup from the grocery store – they do great packages of soup – and some sourdough. That’s nice and simple. We sometimes add a little bit of pastrami for protein, and if it’s tomato soup, then the two teenagers make cheese and ham sandwiches. It’s a little easier on them because their dad and older brother are out at work. That way, there’s fewer sandwiches to make – they’re quite time consuming.
Then on a Wednesday evening, my older daughter cooks again. That’s her second day for the week. One of the options she can choose from is a chicken and vegetable stir fry. She’ll cook up some chicken pieces with sesame and tamari, et cetera, some stir fry vegetables, and some rice noodles. That’s great for everybody, even the gluten-free ones.
She can also choose spaghetti with pesto cream or something simple like that. We usually do gluten-free spaghetti for some of us and ordinary spaghetti for the others. Then there’ll be a side like green beans or ratatouille – she likes to make that. Sometimes she’ll pair it with baked hake, which just needs to be put in the oven with lemon juice, some butter and salt, and some other seasoning like thyme. So, she’ll choose either the chicken, the vegetarian pasta, or the hake. She prefers to have less meat, so her meals are lighter on that. It’s good to have that variety. My son who cooks on Thursday and Saturday loves meat.
For Thursday lunch my youngest son will do chicken in the oven – very simple baked chicken breasts with lots of seasoning in the oven. We sometimes make it into sandwiches with sourdough, or wraps, adding sweet chili sauce and perhaps some mayonnaise, as well as some lettuce and tomato. Alternatively, sometimes he’ll do chicken in the oven with baked potatoes and sweet potatoes. We’ll make a sauce by combining mayonnaise, tomato sauce and lemon juice. It has a shrimp sauce flavor that goes well with the chicken. So, it’ll be chicken with sourdough, chicken with wraps, or chicken with potatoes of some kind.
Then on Thursday evening it’s my oldest son. He’s not usually out at work on a Thursday; he’ll work from home, so that works for him. He’ll make butter chicken curry and rice. We’ll also make a homemade soup with broth as our vegetable. Sometimes he’ll make spaghetti alla carbonara instead. He loves Italian food. We’ll add a side of red peppers, zucchini, and haloumi. Sometimes it’ll be some other kind of Italian pasta. He’s able to make that quite easily in the hour before dinner, so he doesn’t need to do it in advance.
For Friday lunch, my teenage daughter will just warm up some chicken soup, which is also not usually homemade, although it very rarely will be. We have it with some sourdough – nice and easy.
Then Friday evening is pizza and a movie. About once or twice a month, we’ll make homemade pizza with spelt flour. Other times, we’ll get takeout, or in advance we’ll buy frozen pizza that’s hopefully relatively healthy, with whichever toppings the kids like. If it’s homemade, it’ll be with stone ground spelt flour. We’ll add toppings like leftover bolognese, ham and pineapple – or ham and mushroom, et cetera.
For Saturday lunch, everybody’s usually home unless there’s something like youth group. If there’s an event like that, then my youngest daughter, my husband, and I will do something fun and relaxed like getting takeout, and the others will eat at youth. If we’re at home, however, we sometimes have beef soup and sourdough. We’re keeping our lunches very simple because we do so much other cooking for others as well as us.
For a treat, every couple of weeks we’ll have a fruit salad and ice cream meal. We make homemade ice cream with condensed milk and cream, a nice fruit salad by chopping lots of fruit, and then some Irish soda bread or honey yogurt bread with butter and pastrami. Sometimes for extra protein we’ll add chicken and chips. So, that’s a nice friendly meal with lots of nice fruit. We enjoy that.
On the weekend it’s my oldest son most of the time. He loves to cook. On a Saturday evening, he’ll choose between three things – firstly, there’s a rubbed pork in the crockpot with wraps, perhaps homemade spelt wraps if he feels like it. We add lettuce, salsa, and guacamole, and that becomes shredded pork in the wraps. The other options are Greek marinated chicken or barbecue chicken on the grill. We’ll add some tzatziki, haloumi, flatbread, and cucumber. He kind of takes it slow and cooks outside on Saturday evening. Everyone joins him, and it’s a relaxed time.
For Sunday lunch – both boys grill this together – there’s burgers with cheese and sourdough rolls. On alternate weeks, they grill kebabs and sausages with baked potatoes and salad that the girls help with.
Then Sunday evening we have a frozen meal from a grocery store, like lasagna, cottage pie, or anything that looks good. We’ll also have a homemade soup with broth as an appetizer for some good nutrition.
It actually works out to have quite a few relaxed meals and quite a few meals that are cooked from scratch. I’ll help where possible by doing things in advance, doing things in the morning, doing the vegetables or the soup, and et cetera. Sometimes if someone’s unable to cook, then I’ll fill in.
Also, often we’ll be cooking something for my son or my husband to take to work like a beef tenderloin filet with some sweet potato mash. Sometimes we do extra barbecue ribs in the crockpot, or extra baked potatoes – things that go with the meals for those who don’t eat gluten, or perhaps prefer less meat. We’re always filling up the extras in the freezer for those who need it.
Of course, I do the shopping. I try to do it every couple of days because I do it online – I definitely don’t have time to go shopping in person. Most of the time it’s shopping online while looking at the menu, which is very convenient. I do that every couple of days. Then it’s easy to keep up.
I’m doing shopping and cooking for the church at the same time, so there’s quite a lot going on. Just to say more about the church cooking – we cook as a ministry for a few families in the church each week. It works out to about six to eight meals a week. There are other people who help some of the time. Some of those meals are for two people, some for one, and some for five.
Sometimes we’ll double up on something like chicken curry; if my son is making chicken curry for us, then he’ll make some for the church as well. If he’s doing grilled Greek chicken for us, then he’ll do some for church as well.
It’s the same with vegetables – often I’m steaming vegetables on the stove top for church and for us. If we do meatballs, or if my daughter does chicken stir fry often, we’ll often double up those things to make church meals so that it becomes possible and all fits in. Otherwise, if we had to do those separately, it wouldn’t work at all.
So, every Sunday night when we sit down, we use the master menu to make the current week’s menu, and then we stick that on the fridge. Then everybody knows what’s going on, they know what they have to cook or help with, and I know what shopping needs to be done. It works quite well to have a master list because then you have the ideas ready. You put all the meals on there that you like to have as a family, and then you don’t have to think of ideas.
You can always switch some if you want to, if you have a new idea. Generally, though, we stick to that plan, and we fall back on it because then we get to eat all our favorite meals and we don’t have to try hard to think what we want this week. We just say, “Okay, last week we had meatballs, so this week my oldest daughter will do chicken stir fry.” It’s very easy to make the current menu, and then for everybody to get up to scratch with what they’re doing that week. It’s also easy for them to learn more about cooking then, because they’re doing it on repeat, and they’re also assisting the older ones and seeing how it’s done repeatedly.
So, that works well for us. I hope this gives you some ideas and inspiration. I’m always looking for new inspiration and ideas, but not too much because then I don’t stick to the plan!
