Meal Planning Monday - 15th April

It's the last full week of the Easter vacation, finally! I am falling apart without any kind of structure to my days here - today I woke up at 12.35pm having stayed up late writing my dissertation. I go away for the weekend on Friday morning so I only have a few days to plan for.



Today - vegetarian chili. I found this hidden in the freezer; I made it in January!
Tuesday - dinner with my friends from chapel, for which I'll be making a fruit crumble.
Wednesday - tortilla spinach pie with scalloped potatoes.
Thursday - mushroom and pea risotto.

On Sunday evening I'll finish up any leftovers, as we'll be having a big lunch before heading back from the weekend away.

For dessert I have most of a chocolate cola cake which I spontaneously made on the evening of the cookathon, and any fruit crumble that doesn't get eaten (I highly doubt there will be any left though!).

Optimistic Cooking Plans for Saturday

For some reason I have been overwhelmed with the desire to cook lots of new recipes. Today I attempted to make spinach lasagne, only to discover that the spinach I defrosted far too far in advance had gone brown and icky. Feeling rather disgusted with myself, I had to chuck the whole packet into the bin.

So tomorrow bright and early I'm off into town to restock and then coming back for a morning of cooking. One of the things I'll need to buy is another ten plastic storage tubs, as I've filled almost all of mine already - in lieu of the lasagne I make a delicious sausage casserole, and I've also made two Quorn, mushroom and leek pies in the last week. Along with the usual bolognese sauce, pasta bakes and other items already in the freezer, that's about used up the supply.

New to the menu next term, assuming tomorrow goes to plan:

• Baked macaroni and cheese
• Spinach tortilla pie
• Spinach and mushroom lasagne
• Slow-cooker scalloped potatoes
• Fruit crumble (I had a dream about rhubarb the other day, but I think it will be a mixed berry crumble)

Once that lot's done, I have a couple more things to make, namely "meatballs" and spaghetti sauce and a shepherd's pie, and then I should be set until June. I need to beware of cooking too much, since in a couple of months I'll be moving a hundred miles north and I doubt my frozen meals would survive the journey!

Three Things In My Fridge

I was just reading this post about three things which are always in the author's fridge, and it got me thinking. Now, if I were to answer that question it would be very boring. The three things which are always in my fridge are milk, cheddar and olive oil spread, and sometimes I run out of one of those. I just did a quick count and my fridge currently contains fourteen items: milk, mayonnaise, cheddar, tomatoes, mushrooms, olive oil spread, eggs, mayonnaise, two types of jam, honey, lemon juice, tomato ketchup and some cranberry sauce left over from Christmas. I consider that fairly well-stocked.

Don't forget, I also have a freezer. That's where most of my food is: already cooked and portioned, ready to be defrosted and heated up each evening. Things which don't need to be kept cold live in the kitchen cupboard. I'm not starving to death by any means.

But I do wish I had more food in my fridge, because that would also imply that I had more people eating it, and more time to cook it. I would love to have a fridge bursting with fresh vegetables, left-overs from last night's dinner, snacks and treats and things that will get eaten before they become sentient. A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about my short-, mid- and long-term goals and realised that they can all be summed up by the desire for a kitchen. Short-term, a kitchen with fewer than 14 people using it. Mid-term, a kitchen with just me and my family using it. Long-term, the kitchen of my dreams. All my other hopes and ambitions are embodied in those dreams.

The empty fridge, though, is an even more clear image of things I'm looking forward to changing in future. My approach to meals is keeping me healthy and nourished while I'm busy with other things, but I do get a bit tired of the sameness of eating from a necessarily limited selection of meals. There's only so much space in the freezer, and it makes sense to cook large batches of the same thing.

In three weeks, term ends and I will have a little more breathing space. I'm planning on making another lasagne or several, and a couple more pies, because those were delicious. I've got some interesting recipes lined up to try out and a few old favourites will be sticking around (spaghetti with "meat"balls and blue cheese is still one of my favourite meals). I will still not be able to spend an hour cooking each night, preparing vegetables and cooking sides to go with my main course, because at that rate I'd not be eating before 9pm. Student life is a funny old business.

What's Cooking This Week

My freezer stash, which began the year heaving with lasagna, pie, bolognese and "meat"ball sauce, was starting to look a little sad. I've had a productive work week so far, so I took the evening off to tackle a couple of big cooking projects.

A few days ago I had set my slow cooker to work on a batch of curry, so I was already off to a good start with four portions of Quorn, potato and lentil curry (the ingredients are what I happened to have lying around). At the weekend my mum came to visit and brought with her a packet of meatball pasta bake mix, which I immediately began to crave. As luck would have it, I had both a bag of soya meatballs in the freezer and a box of pre-cooked pasta in the fridge, which I had taken out intending to eat it for lunch and fortunately forgotten.

I also wanted to make another batch of Quorn chasseur, as I had quite a lot of Quorn fillets and two packets of the sauce mix, so I tackled the two at once. It worked surprisingly well - the chasseur takes an hour to cook and the pasta bake only 25 minutes, so I managed to cook, eat, portion out the leftovers and clean up before it was time to get the casseroles out of the oven. People were coming in and out of the room to prepare their own dinner; it's always nice to have the chance to chat to my neighbours as we stir and chop.

Tonight's main topic of conversation was the kitchen food thief, who has been raiding people's cupboards - so far a bag of rice and a jar of pesto have been taken (whoever it is is very brazen - the stolen pesto was discovered, open, in the communal fridge). We aren't sure who it is, but I have suspicions. I'm not quite sure what we can do about it, other than locking our cupboards and hiding everything away. It's very depressing not to be able to trust people.

Anyway, everything went to plan this time (no melted plastic layer on top of the casserole) and I now have another eleven meals frozen away. On Friday my dad and his partner will be visiting and I will be using up the remaining Quorn fillets for fajitas, using the seasoning mix that came free in my Good Food Show goodie bag. On Saturday we're off to a food fair at a local farm, which promises to be delicious - and also provides a goodie bag to take home! I love freebies, they often inspire me to try new recipes and have even introduced me to some new brands once or twice.

Lunch: Still my Downfall

I originally started this blog as a way to motivate myself to eat more interesting lunches, or just more lunches in general. It has spiralled off into being a more general food blog, and I honestly think it has been part of the reason that I have taken far better control over my diet and learnt to cook, meal plan and shop.
But lunch is still my nemesis. Every day, I still sigh and think "what on earth am I going to have for lunch?". There are days, like today, where I have toast because I can't think of anything else, or I don't have any other food.
Once again I'm making an effort to get lunch under the same control as the rest of my life. My approach to dinner has been fairly successful, so I shall employ it again for the middle of the day: cooking ahead, and freezing portions to defrost.
So far my lunch ideas for the freezer include pasta salad, egg mayo rolls, cheese and tomato wraps and potato salad. I'm also thinking about soup in a mug sachets, and tins of soup, and some pita breads to fill with cheese and Marmite - a childhood favourite and fairly simple to make.
Armed with a shopping list, I'm off into town to stock up on lunch foods... again.

The BBC Good Food Show and Christmas

Some while back, I entered a giveaway competition over on Mrs M's. I only enter giveaways if I really want the prize, and often they are only open to US residents, but the nice thing about our Mrs M is that she's here in the UK! The prizes in question were three pairs of tickets to the BBC Winter Good Food Show, and by chance the dates fell right around the end of my university term. I entered, assuming as I did so that I would never win, and promptly forgot all about it.

Meal Planning Monday - October 8th - 14th

I have been reading At Home with Mrs M for months, but only just decided that I wanted to take part in her weekly meal planning blog hop. Meal planning, as anyone who has read my blog before will know, is a huge time-saver for me during term. I actually tend to plan for the week ahead some time during the weekend, although naturally plans shift a little as things get organised last minute.

I don't always plan out my lunches, but it does help to have some ideas of things that don't involve bread - I'm not terribly imaginative with lunch. I start my meal plan by consulting my diary and making a note of anything which is happening that affects my meals. For instance, this week I have a drinks party and a dance class straight after my tutoring lesson tonight, so I needed something extremely quick but not too heavy. The choir are going out for curry on Wednesday night, but I couldn't afford to join them so I will be having my own curry at home so as not to miss out entirely. On Saturday I'm going to a full-day event which includes a cooked lunch, so I chose something light for my evening meal.

Day	Lunch	Dinner
Monday	Spicy chickpeas	Sweet potato & leek soup
Tuesday	Couscous	Zucchini potato pancakes
Wednesday	Spicy chickpeas	Rogan Josh with rice
Thursday		Mushroom risotto
Friday		Spaghetti bolognese
Saturday	Event lunch	Quorn chasseur
Sunday		Chapel supper

And I have just noticed that this is my 100th post! I would never have expected to keep up a food blog for this long. It's great to look back and see how much better I have become at both cooking and managing my meals.

Store Cupboard Eating

My new year's resolution to attempt a new recipe every fortnight has not been going very well. I haven't cooked anything at all for some time now, because I'm making a desparate attempt to empty my freezer so that I can defrost it, and to avoid buying more food when I have so much stored already.

Representative contents of brown bags shown

As a result I've been eating a lot of rather samey meals. Mostly spinach quiche, which whilst being delicious was also huge. I haven't yet got bored of eating it, but I suspect that with another three portions to go I might well be glad when it's finally finished.

Batch Cooking for the Freezer

In the last three days I have made quite a lot of food. I've cooked for between 2 and 5 people each night, although admittedly often it only involved shoving something out of the freezer into the oven for a while, but in between times I've made spaghetti bolognese sauce, curry, meatfree meatballs in a tomato sauce, spinach spaghetti, and shepherd's pie. I've filled fifteen individual portion containers and I've not even divided up the pie yet.

The Freezer of Doom

I decided it was time to clear out my dad's freezer to see exactly what was in there, so that I could more efficiently plan my attack for the next week and a half.

It was a scary, scary place.

This is kind of how I felt. Image by Michal Marcol.

New Year's Recipe Resolution

My cooking has been quite sporadic since I got back to uni this year. At the start of term it was going well - my meal planner meant I was cooking something new most days and I managed to get ahead with my freezer stash. That's a good thing since I somehow stopped cooking about half way through the term. It was a combination of work piling up, choir taking over and time feeling more stretched that meant I mostly fell back on pasta and sauce, and whatever I had in the freezer - mostly pasta sauce, oddly.

Freezer Meals

My schedule is becoming an increasingly large problem. Sunday - Thursday I am not home before 6.30 and usually more like 7.30, and I am not keen on starting to cook that late. I've found myself eating dinner at 9pm before now, although only once have I fallen into the trap of just grazing on whatever is in the cupboards instead of having a proper meal.

Food Waste and Planning

Image by Colleen Lane, used under Creative Commons licence

Over lunch today, I've been listening to a BBC Women's Hour podcast from October 11th and there is a very interesting discussion about waste, and in particular food waste. I found two things very interesting. The first was a woman who said that she didn't use a shopping list and just shopped "with her eyes", which is a great way of putting it! Later on, she went on to say that she kept buying melons because they looked nice, and then putting them on the counter and watching them rot. So now she doesn't buy melons.

An Update on the Freezer

I've been living here for a little over a week now and I'm still so pleased to have a freezer. I've yet to use any of the freezer meals, but that just means that I'll have more meals (and more variety) when it really does come to crunch time.

Thursday might have been a day when I should have eaten a freezer meal. I was busy from 4pm til 8.30pm without any time at all to eat - I just sprinted into my room to change my shoes or drop off my lectures notes and grab a glass of water. It looks like every Thursday will be this way, so I'm going to shift things round and eat a cooked meal at lunchtime and pre-prepare a packed tea for whenever I find a free minute in the evening. It's all about flexibility :-)

Back at University

Well, I'm moved in and (mostly) unpacked. I've discovered I've left a few kitchen items at home - my washing up bowl and the whisks for my hand mixer are the biggest problem but I can cope until I get them. And I've cooked my first back-to-uni meal, using some of the spices from my brand new spice rack.

This was a present from my brother - the most delicious present ever!

Meal Planning

All the food blogs I read agree: meal planning is the way to go if you want to avoid food waste, daily shopping trips, lack of inspiration and general cooking malaise.

For the last few weeks I've been kicking around an idea for a meal planner that takes a list of possible meals, along with a points value based on healthiness, ease of cooking and opinion (so for example something that is complicated, unhealthy and not really popular would get three points, whilst something that is quick, healthy and delicious would get one) and then generates a weekly meal plan with a maximum of fifty points per week, ten per day.

That was the plan. When I sat down at my computer to create the spreadsheet I had envisaged, I hit a problem. I had absolutely no idea how to do it.