The planning post

In the last post of this introductory series — we’ve had who am I and why I’m doing this, but possibly most importantly, let’s go for what are my current food habits, and how do I want to develop them?

It’s hard to know what’s showing off and what isn’t. As well as releasing a lot of pent-up cookery writing energy, I also want to help myself. As I noted, I’m actually growing up a bit at the moment, and I want to improve my food habits. I want to manage my time better.

So, here’s a rundown of how things work for me, and what the structure of the posts will be around.

Why tupperware tales, you ask?

One of my least favourite things in life is wasting food. So I like to make sure everything has a use, which results in a sort of chain reaction of using something up, then using up whatever I bought to go with the last thing I bought to use something up.

This means a lot of planning, and a lot of tupperware boxes… ya see? I plan out what I’m going to make meticulously, trying to give most dishes a dual purpose, of either supplying enough leftovers to eat again another day, or buying enough ingredients to kickstart another recipe.

Meal planning is something people don’t talk about much. It’s generally seen as something for families, buying huge portions and cooking things that will feed five people at once. It’s much trickier to stretch your ingredients when you’ve got fewer people to cater for.

Everything I make tends to be based around the ingredients I have in the house. The cycle runs thus: I make a big decadent meal (say, a roast dinner, or experimenting with a Brazilian feijoda), there are inevitably leftover ingredients (say, extra potatoes, vegetables, chicken stock), I look up some new recipes to use up said ingredients, I buy more ingredients, and then I run into looking for recipes to use up those ingredients.

It’s fairly satisfying, actually, and while I can definitely limit myself to ‘pasta with all the vegetables that didn’t make it into the roast because vegetables bafflingly come in pre-dictated amounts when you buy them from the supermarket in a packet’ to just use things up, it’s a fun way of prompting myself to try new things.

It means that when I’m not around every night of the week, I’ve still got a steer on what I want to cook when I am, or that I can cook bigger portions and heat some up when I arrive home on a weeknight.

But the bit that makes this a real success is definitely taking some time to sit down and plan ahead at the beginning of the week. While batch cooking sounds like the sort of thing I should be in to, I get bored really easily.

My usual routine of a (working) week is: cook exciting things at the weekend, then on Sunday sit down and assess what I’ve got left over and what I can do with that stuff in the week. I also bring in my own lunches to work as much as possible. I will cook a ‘batch’ of two portions of two recipes so I can alternate them between Monday and Thursday lunchtimes and then treat myself for doing so well on a Friday (because I can’t work that near Leather Lane market and not indulge). Then depending on what I’m up to in the week, I’ll either make myself meals on various evenings and eat the leftovers on others, or, as often happens, be out for dinner.

It’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, and that’s something I enjoy — routine without being boring, creativity without being wasteful.

So with this blog, I want to glorify the meal plan, but also factor in teaching myself new things while I’m doing it. I want to have ideas for the next recipe in my head rather than looking them up online — but in the name of sharing and caring, helping other people look them up in the meantime. I’ll merge recipes into what the first recipe led to, and talk about goals and aims I’ve achieved along the way.

It’s all in the planning.

[Image via Pexels]