Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping Sanity Savers

Before kids grocery shopping used to be a whole different experience.  My partner and I would go together.  Discuss products, read labels, compare nutrition and prices.....  Now it is me, and I need to do it before my three year old gets over it.  I am lucky, my kids are great at the supermarket.  I take their lunchboxes, and they sit in the trolley and eat their way around the supermarket.  But when they run out of food, I can feel my time to shop running out, so I try and make it as streamlined as possible.  For me that means four key ingredients:

1.  Meal Planning
2.  An Organised List
3.  Shopping fortnightly (with a top up shop during the week, where I only need a few perishable things like milk, bread fruit and fish).
4.  Good use of my freezer - I buy bread and meat ahead and freeze.

So lets look at each part:

Meal Planning
Why plan?   No more stressing about 'what's for dinner'.  Save money on throwing away food you thought you would use - only buying what you need.  Ensuring healthy and varied meals for your family.
How? I start by pulling two pieces of paper out of my scrap paper stash.  Ideally no paper leaves our house (via the recycling bin) without both sides being used, so I have a stash of paper to use the back of.  Things that have been folded in the post are in my basket, and nice flat pieces are on my kids desk for them to use for drawing and writing.
The first is turned into a meal plan for the coming fortnight.  I indicate each day with a letter, and then write what we will have.  Sometimes I end up swapping the meals around, but planning like this means I know what I need to buy and when I need to get stuff out of the freezer.  I keep a list (mental and physical) of favourite family meals and cycle through them, using a combination of sure-fire-winners, things I want us to try, and things we like to have sometimes.  There is a seasonal variety too.  During the fortnight, if think of something we could have in the next fortnight, I'll jot it at the bottom, and that makes the next lot of planning easier.  You can see the meal plan on the cat clip in the picture.
The second piece of paper is the next fortnights shopping list, see below.
After I've planned the meals, I add the ingredients I need to the shopping list on the fridge, depending on what I already have in the fridge, freezer and pantry.
Both lists are attached to my fridge.
Sometimes we have an 'eat out the pantry' or 'eat out the freezer' fortnight, where we just focus on reducing the amount of stuff in the pantry or freezer.

An Organised List
So on meal planning day there are two lists.  One on the fridge, and one blank template which I start adding items to AFTER I've done the grocery shopping.  I'll put the other one aside and it can go up on the fridge once grocery shopping is done.  I can jot on it anything we could not get and can wait a fortnight for.
I organise my list into sections, following the layout of my supermarket.  Thus there are sections for

• Fruit, Vege, Bulk and Eggs
• Meat and Fish
• Deli,
• Frozen
• Bread
• Grocery.

And to be further organised, the grocery items are written on there in the general order in which the appear in the aisles of the supermarket.  e.g. if toilet paper is in the aisle I will come to half way through my journey around the supermarket, it goes halfway down the list.  This really does save backtracking, and thus my energy and sanity.
When we use something up, we add it to the list.  Simple.
Then I add what I'll need from the meal planner,
Then I check our stores of fruit, vegie, milk, eggs, and bread and add what we need

It is a system the whole family can buy into and use.

Meal Planning and Shopping Lists on Fridge

Shopping Fortnightly
Simply put this means less time at the supermarket overall.  A good thing.  It also means I use my car less, as I can walk most other places, but cannot get a weeks worth of groceries into the buggy now my daughter and my family are bigger!

Good use of my Freezer
Have you noticed most 'dashes' to the supermarket usually end up costing at least $20, even if you only went in for bread!  So it does make sense to go less often, and definitely don't go when you are hungry!  You can minimise these visits to weekly if you plan ahead and keep what you need in your fridge, cupboards and freezer.  I buy bread for the week, and keep it in the freezer.  This works really well.

So there you have it, the key ingredients to staying saner as dinner time approaches or the supermarket shopping day looms!