Weekly meal planning: Any successful planners care to share methods?

Does anyone here have long-term experience planning weekly meals in advance, and following these plans successfully?

Personally, I've done quite well following an impulsive-chaotic method, but I could do with some words of wisdom from experienced meal planners.

Please post, even if (or especially if) your successful method seems very obvious and simple.

What are the steps you follow?

Impulsive-chaotic method????

Dammit! I thought I was the only one who used that.

A planner I am not Egesa so I can't help on that front.

Look forward to any forthcoming tips on how to turn the raging success of chaos cooking into the dismal failure of organised menu planning though.

Hi Egesa, I am the worst person to talk about meal planning! Firestorm has posted about meal planning before, maybe if he is around he could give you some tips.

I am currently following the McDougall diet so most of my meals come from that. I tend to plan out meals I want to make in the week and pick meals that share a lot of the same ingredients. Most are rice or potato based and have lentils and beans. And then loads of veggies. I otoo didn't have clue what to do but I learned slowly. I was an impulse eater but I often ended up wasting ingredients. So this method works for me. Collate a load of recipes you like in a folder and cross-match by ingredients. But it's fairly easy on this diet as most are based around starchy food. Or you could just spend a day making up meals and freezing them?

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Blueberries

Hi Egesa, I am the worst person to talk about meal planning! Firestorm has posted about meal planning before, maybe if he is around he could give you some tips.

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Yup, I plan my meals weeks in advance.
Last year about September I took a complete inventory of every vegan food item in the house, then planned the next 3 months of meals using the stuff I already had instead of buying more.
This year I have a different tact, I'm cooking from a different cookbook each week which is great for meal planning/food shopping as I find that a lot of recipes in a book use the same ingredients repeatedly (E.G next week I am cooking from vegan slow cooking for two or just for you by Kathy Hester, which uses "Unsweetened non dairy milk" in several of the recipes I'm using so I only need to buy 1 carton of non dairy milk, it also uses Italian seitan in several so I can make a batch and then use it for several recipes as well) this cuts down the amount of stuff you need to buy and make.

I have 2 tips that I find really useful:
1 - Make as much as possible on Saturday or Sunday and freeze it for the week ahead.
2 - Make big portions, split them, freeze some for the following week/month and use leftovers (I always try to make enough to ensure leftovers) for lunch the next day which cuts meal planning by a third as lunches are already sorted.

CluelessGit and Blueberries, we're in the majority here - so far we still outnumber the meal planners 3:2!

Thanks Misosoup and Firestorm for your relatively rare insights. Do you list what you've planned for every meal for every day of the week, and then add the needed ingredients to your shopping list? I suppose it must be that simple. Or perhaps a list of recipes set for the week, to choose from in any order? Often when I plan meals, I end up using the same ingredients to make something else. It takes discipline to follow plans... or maybe some healthy stubbornness to stick with them.

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Egesa

Do you list what you've planned for every meal for every day of the week, and then add the needed ingredients to your shopping list?

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Yep! I tend to pick what I am going to make (taking in to consideration what I have in as well), then buy anything that I need on top

I plan nothing. :D

^ hehehe I find it fun to be spontaneous, and I trust my instincts to know what I need each day. as long as it's wholefoods-based & balanced I've usually seemed to get it right.

... but maybe being a boring planner can be fun too trying out more recipes which require ingredients I wouldn't otherwise have that week, less waste, etc - there are pros and cons of each approach, so I'm giving planning another try.

^^ Firestorm, how do you consider nutrition? That's where I've really complicated things in the past - trying to work out the nutritional content of meals for the week - or do you consider nutrition instinctively too, as you said with using several recipes which use many of the same ingredients?

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Egesa

^^ Firestorm, how do you consider nutrition? That's where I've really complicated things in the past - trying to work out the nutritional content of meals for the week - or do you consider nutrition instinctively too, as you said with using several recipes which use many of the same ingredients?

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Do you meat calories/fat/sugar/salt or vitamins/minerals?

I'll take that as a typo - ("meat" = "mean"?) Yes, all of those. Ideally I'd plan meals for each week without too many calories, but which meet all nutritional needs, particularly vitamins, minerals, and amino acids (or at least proteins as a single general category). I've used software (cron-o-meter), but in planning all meals for a week, it does get a bit complicated & time-consuming.

Hi
Yes I meant "mean" not "meat" - I should have been wearing my glasses!
I don't really get too concerned about the vitamin side (most of the food is full of veg, I get the primaries such as D2 and B12 from soy milk/Marg/yogurt (which I eat by the shed load)). I feel the same way about protein - its in almost every food we eat and human requirements are far smaller than we think so I don't worry too much about protein.
Regarding calories and fat I do a rough calculation of the total calories and fat for the total recipe and how much each individual portion therefore contains, I keep this with a record of the recipe so I can quickly make the recipe again and know the nutritional content.
Some cookbooks actually provide this info though

Thanks again Firestorm, very much appreciated. That seems very sensible. I'll copy what you're doing for the time being.

I agree with your approach to protein as a general rule, it has kept me very healthy on a strictly vegan diet for the past 11 years without worrying much about protein. Lately however I'm cutting down my heavy dependence on soy, due to possible hormonal sensitivity, and considering the ratio of different amino acids in relation to each other rather than just getting enough of everything. This does make a difference to body and brain chemistry - not something for the average vegan to bother with, but personally I do seem to benefit from this tweaking of my diet (hormones, clear thinking, energy). This is part of my reason for wanting a more controlled, planned diet. I think it'd be a good idea to focus on keeping certain foods in and out, and as you do with calories, I'll try just a rough calculation.