Meal Planning Monday

Well, as you know, last week I tried out one of the 5 for £20 evening meal plans that Sainsbury's have been promoting. I thought, before I went on to what we're eating this week, that I'd talk about how it went.



The shopping went fairly well. It came to £21.30 for the items for the evening meal. This is a little over budget, but there were a few things that affected this.

1. There were no smoked salmon trimmings. (Looking on the website, it seems these might have been out of stock everywhere). In its place, I decided to buy smoked salmon sandwich slices, which cost £3.19, an eye watering £2.21 over the budget - well, it is when the budget is only £20.

2. There were no turkey breast fillets but we got turkey mince instead. However, this was the same price.

3. I overbought on the sweet potatoes and carrots. This is because the aisle we were on had no scales to check. There were scales on the two other aisles and this one had the most loose items. Seemed odd. Also, the onions I bought loose were all huge so I suspect I overbought on them too.

4. I left a few items off as I knew I had plenty at home of some items. This may have accounted for about £2 of things I didn't buy.

So, on balance, if I had bought everything EXACTLY as the list, I would have probably been very close to the £20.

So, how were the meals? We enjoyed them all. I think the favourite was the turkey and bean lasagne which I shall definitely be making again. I thought it worked well with the turkey mince instead of the pieces. The spaghetti was interesting - there was far too much spaghetti. The risotto, I kind of adapted because I realised that the only cheese in the risotto was mozzarella which to me is a foul idea so I added some parmesan we had in the house, and I added in some spicy chorizo that I had in the fridge.

And here some of them are. I forgot to take a picture of the the risotto - you can blame me wanting to get dinner finished before the England match started on Friday.

All in all, we were generally impressed with the meals and we'll definitely be having some again. I've got some of the meals from the other meal plans on the list for this week tho I will probably be making them my own way.

So, what's on the menu this week? Here goes.

Monday - Toad in the hole, gravy, mash and peas
Tuesday - Jacket potatoes (with unknown filling)
Wednesday - Butternut squash and coconut curry
Thursday - Cheesy fish pie
Friday - Home made pizza with carrot sticks, tomatoes and cucumber
Saturday - Fajitas
Sunday - left free

Don't forget to go visit Mrs M's blog to see what others are having. And don't forget to tell me what you're having this week!

Edit - I forgot to say when I was writing this post that I was a bit perturbed about using intensively reared poultry as usually, I buy at least Freedom Food standard, if not free range. Given that 3 meals out of 5 were poultry based, this was a problem and I really struggled with myself to buy the intensively reared stuff. If only Sainsbury's could improve welfare standards across the board. I usually compensate for the increased price by using cheaper cuts - for example, I buy thigh fillets instead of chicken breast. And chicken breast is the most expensive way of buying chicken!