Menu Plan Monday

Monday - Veggie Bean Burgers with Wedges and salad
Tuesday - Golden vegetable soup with nice bread
Wednesday - Cajun Chicken and wedges with salad
Thursday - Hubby and I have date night, he is using a meal kit from the supermarket and our adult boys are on their own for dinner.
Friday - Cottage pie
Saturday - Polenta Lasagne (yummy)
Sunday - Roast Chicken with all the trimmings

Most of our meals this week come from one of the hairy Dieter's books.  I will try and make time to turn one or two of them into photo recipes BUT it is back to school week here in the UK and for me that means back to work, so we'll have to see how that goes.  I know you can see some of the writing from the previous menus, I need to give my chalkboard a bit of a clean up.

I thought I would share with you my menu planning / shopping list sheet.  It's an excel file and if you click on the image below it should take you to Google docs where you can download the file.  There is a slight problem with the file as it appears on google docs and that is  it has all pages as landscape even though in my copy I have this sheet as portrait and the other sheet as landscape but you should be able to correct that fairly easily.

In the top line I put any events for that week.  The ones you see in there at the moment are regular events, I will add any others before I start menu planning.

You can see there are certain days I try to cook certain things.  Vegetarian twice a week, soup and sandwiches one day (which sometimes turns into vegetarian as well) and one day (at least) of fish. Although you can see from my chalkboard menu at the top that we don't have fish this week.
I make a note of which day of the week I will be doing the main grocery shop that week and then below each day's menu I list any ingredients needed for that day.  I cross through anything I know we have in, add into that bottom section any other things we need (not connected with specific meals) and make a shopping list from that.

If you can't open excel files, I do also have a pdf version and you can download that by clicking here.  Menu Plan Shopping List.  That doesn't have the issue with which way round the paper is, so if you prefer not to mess with that, I suggest using this version.


You can check out other people's menu plans by clicking the image below.

You can check out the other sites I link up to over in my sidebar. Before you go, why not check out my recipes index page, or my craft projects index page, I am sure you will find something there to interest you.