When I announced I was doing a series on struggles with Meal Planning I was offered one more struggling point – “Coping with unscheduled changes that effect dinner time or preparation time.”
If this sounds like you, don’t worry – you are not alone! Depending on your Meal Planning Personality® you need to tackle this slightly differently! The guides go through exactly how to approach this, but I thought I’d share some tips that will help you all immediately!
Coping with unscheduled changes
If this is happening everyday we need to look at what you can do to engineer out your thinking. In our post on thinking ahead we have tips to help you identify the traps in your week, so if for example you know you have soccer practice every week, make sure on those days you focus on having items on hand so no cooking is required.
When you have unscheduled changes I recommend you have a few strategies up your sleeve so you can pull a meal together out of nothing in under 15 minutes:
Freezer – bulk cooking
- Always keep your freezer stocked with bulk meals. For example a curry or bolognese sauce is perfect. Getting into the habit of keeping these items means your freezer becomes a treasure trove!
Be particular about what you buy
- It is essential to create a shopping list of stock standard ingredients so be sure to check out this post so you know you ALWAYS have a good supply of food you can use to whip together meals when life goes nuts and off the rails. Click here to grab it
Shop your pantry
- This is absolutely essential – create a list of 10-15 min recipes that you can whip together with the usual contents of your fridge, freezer and pantry. Stick it on the fridge and it will save your bacon countless times over!!!
Quick Cooking Shortcut: Use your oven
- Oven baked fish – ready in 15 minutes and when you roast a capsicum with it and have kale/ baby spinach you make a salad with it in NO TIME seriously easy and because the oven does all the work you can just pop it in and WALK A WAY! Click here to grab it
Quick Cooking Shortcut: Salad items in fridge
- Keep a supply of a ready made salad/ chopped vegetables in the fridge. This makes life so much easier as you can just use these vegetables as your side. See my favourite cabbage salad recipe by clicking here – I love this and it is so handy!
Quick Cooking Shortcut: Always have Roast Pumpkin/ Sweet Potato in the fridge
- I love sweet potato and it is so handy to whip together quick meals. Even in this picture for this post is a super quick meal – leftover pumpkin, spinach and mung bean pasta. For more ideas on what to do with sweet potato, click here
Quick Cooking Shortcut: What’s in your Freezer?
- This recipe from Jamie Oliver – Brilliant Veggie Burgers shows just how easy it is to grab things from your freezer and turn them into a meal. The best piece of equipment to have on hand to make quick cooking easy is a food processor. Any basic one will do – honestly!!! Yes you can use a fancy one (e.g. Thermomix) if you like. But either way – I don’t care – just invest in one to make your food prep easy NOW!
- This recipe – Brilliant Veggie Burgers – uses frozen vegetables. I would simplify it by not bothering to make the mayo or the onion rings – just follow the recipe for the burger and you are DONE!!!!!!!!!! See the recipe by clicking here.
For tips on tackling the other struggles click on each post:
c) Fitting cooking into my working week
Now I would love to hear from you! Tell me what other struggles you’re having? I’d love to offer tips that are helpful and inspire you to get organised and make your life easier!
Don’t forget – Click here to take the quiz and discover more information on the Meal Planning Personality® Profiles.
Comments on this entry are closed.