I like to plan my menu for the week on Saturday nights; otherwise, a few days into the week I’d be figuring out the meals as I went along and wondering why I didn’t do some advance planning to keep mealtimes running smoothly!  Posting it here helps me feel more accountable to myself to get it done at the beginning of the week.

I start my planning by taking a look at what I have in the fridge, freezer and pantry (this includes leftovers).

Breakfast at this point is just about always eggs, oatmeal or polenta so it doesn’t require any planning.  Snacks are usually vegetables, sometimes fruit. I usually include some kind of vegetable with dinner if the dish that I plan doesn’t include any but I don’t plan that in advance – it’s pretty easy to chop up a plate of cucumber rounds.

I avoid gluten (no pasta and bread) and dairy.

Sunday: lunch – Shabbos leftovers; dinner – lima beans with chicken

Monday: l – chicken minestrone soup ; dinner – hot dogs, potatoes and green beans

Tuesday: l – lentil loaf, chummus, tomatoes ; d – chicken breast, rice, roasted summer vegetables

Weds: l – Spanish chickpeas and rice; d – baked sweet potatoes, chicken wings, salad

Thurs – l – chickpea and peanut stew; d –  kasha, ground meat sauce

Last week I made lentil loaf and made four pans; I stuck two of them in the freezer. I usually don’t like to serve the same dish two weeks in a row but this week my freezer is jam packed since my husband generously stocked us up on chicken. Combining that with the large amount of donor milk that I suddenly received in a two day period for Rafael (I never say no to donor milk, it is so vital to his health and it always gets priority for freezer space!), I want to get whatever I can out to make room for holiday cooking.

Here are some examples of how I integrate what I have in the house along with planned leftovers into this week’s menu:

I don’t have lima beans but chose the lima beans with chicken recipe since my planned experiment to roast broad beans for a snack didn’t work out. I overcooked the beans and then they were too soft. They don’t taste the same as limas but I think they’re similar enough that it will work.

For Monday’s lunch, I’ll be using whatever is left of Sunday’s dinner of broad beans and chicken, and add vegetables to make a soup similar to minestrone. That way I won’t have an odd container of dinner leftovers sitting around in the fridge growing mold while I forget that I put it there and don’t recognize it when I finally open it up.  (No, that has never happened to me. :))

When I cook rice for Tuesday night’s dinner, I’ll double the recipe and use half of what I make for the next day’s lunch of Spanish chickpeas and rice.

I’ll use any leftover roasted summer vegetables from Tuesday night’s dinner in the chickpea peanut stew for Thursday lunch, since those are the vegetables the recipe calls for.

By the way, I don’t buy canned beans so I soak and then cook all beans that are in any of the recipes I use. Very frugal and super easy.

On Tuesday night I’ll soak a large package of dried chickpeas, then will cook them first thing Weds. morning.  They’ll be ready to use in time for lunch, and I’ll have enough for lunch the next day of chickpea peanut stew, too.  Often I’ll freeze a large amount of cooked beans, and later I can quickly pull them out to add to a dish.

Most weeks I make a double recipe of a dish and then put half of it in the freezer for another week. This cuts down on how many meals I’m making from scratch and simplifies my day. We all prefer this to what I used to do, which was to make something for dinner, then serve it again for lunch the next day.  I’ll empty my freezer a bit at the end of the week when I cook for Shavuos and then in the coming week I’ll get back to freezing meals for dinner.

I haven’t been careful to record all the food expenses separately so I can’t tell you exactly what our monthly food bill is at this time. We budget 1100 shekels a week for food, transportation and miscellaneous expenses.

Have a great week!

Avivah