The Meal Planning Linky Week #106 Meal Plan

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Good morning! Happy Friday! I hope you’ve had a great first week back at work, getting back into the swing of life etc. I’m really looking forward to a nice family weekend – just one more work day to get through first!

Last week’s meal plan was such a good one and I’m really enjoying mixing it up at the moment. This week we’re going to have a Hello Fresh box, as my lovely sister-in-law gave me a code to get one completing free of charge, which is so kind! I’m looking forward to having a different box of recipes to try out.

Having absolutely minimal food waste is always important to me. I’m making things stretch even further at the moment because we still have so many house jobs to pay for. I will be taking steps to make sure we are avoiding overspending on groceries. This week I’m lucky not to be spending much more AT ALL! Also, I’ve got a Simply Cook meal kit, I’ll share a bit more about that later on!

Every week I sit down, for around 20 minutes, and I plan out a week of dinners. I look on the calendar, to see what engagements we have upcoming. Then I look in the fridge & chest freezer to see what meat, vegetables and other ingredients we have that need using up. This really helps me avoid food waste and means that we can eat a variety of different dinners each week. While I’m doing my meal plan I make a loose plan of breakfast and lunches that we can eat too, although I’m not quite as rigid planning these. I mostly just make sure that we’ve got the right ingredients in so we have a nice variety of breakfasts and lunches.

I’ve been meal planning for 2 years now and it is a great way to save money, for sure. As long as I plan dinners around Tom’s work shifts this works well for us and mostly keeps us away from the takeaways. We do love a cheeky Chinese from time to time though! Like on Tuesday when I accidentally napped the whole evening away and woke up at 8:30pm and didn’t want to start cooking!

In the past, I switched from shopping at Tesco to shopping at Aldi and saved over 30% and while this does work well it requires quite a bit of effort and so I’ve found myself using Sainsburys more recently.

Each week I invite other bloggers to link up their meal plans, to try and share recipes around with one another, inspire each other and hopefully drive a little bit of extra traffic too!

The rules of the Meal Planning Linky

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How to link up with The Meal Planning Linky Week #106

Once your post is live all you need to do is hit the button that says “Click here to enter”. This takes you to the link-up page where you can add your post.

The Meal Planning Linky Week #106

I’ve planned 7 dinners this week. We *might* leave one of these towards the following week and have a takeaway instead, just to be realistic! We do love a nice takeaway from time to time as we’ve been really busy working hard and doing DIY in our new house.

Grab yourself a £1 Simply Cook box!

I recently ordered myself a Simply Cook box (Paid for it myself but as I’m using a referral code here this section of this post is technically an AD). You select 4 meals and get sent a little box with 3 spice, herb and stock blends plus a recipe card. Then you just buy the ingredients you need and you can make a fantastic dinner with ease. It’s a little like a Hello Fresh or Gousto box, but without the expense and you have to buy the fresh items still. However, for just £1 you can get 4 of these little kits to liven up mealtimes and get some inspiration. I’ve got a couple of boxes now so that next time I want to cook something a bit different I’ve got the inspiration already on hand! If you want to grab a box for £1 just *sign up to Simply Cook. This is a subscription service so be sure to cancel if you don’t want it to renew at £9.99 – I just set myself a reminder for a few days before the next box needed to be selected.

The meals for the Meal Planning Linky Week #106 are:

Lemony chicken linguine (From our Hello Fresh box)

Quick pork stir fry (From our Hello Fresh box)

Slow cooker cottage pie

Sausage, pear & root veg traybake (From our Hello Fresh box)

One pot Mexican beef and rice (From our Hello Fresh box)

Prince Harry’s chicken pie (From our Hello Fresh box)

Moroccan lamb burgers, homemade cheese buns & air fryer chips  

If you’re looking for meal planning inspiration then be sure to read my meal planning tips. Also, check out my meal planning with mince post. I’ve also got a post about how to stretch a whole chicken.

Why not check out some of my latest recipes?

• Ninja Foodi apple chips
• Air fryer parmentier potatoes
• Air fryer frozen roast potatoes
• Ninja Foodi chicken tikka
• Ninja Foodi fruit scones