July Monthly Meal Plan
All the recipes, all the details! Switching to a monthly meal plan is one of the best things I've done for myself this year.
I’m not sure about you, but coming up with new meals every week just takes more mental bandwidth than I have in me. Life this year has been really mentally taxing for a bunch of reasons, and this has SAVED. MY SANITY. Seriously.
In case you’re new here, here’s the lowdown:
At the end of every month, I make a meal plan. For the sake of being efficient with our time and energy, we cook a four-serving dinner every second night and have the leftovers in between! For lunches, I try to pick recipes that will work for at least 4 days worth of lunches, preferably 5-7 days. Breakfasts were super boring and usually have the same things. I have smoothies or porridge and Matt has overnight oats or porridge.
I then make up a big grocery list and then Matt (my husband) and I do one big grocery haul. We do top ups for things like fruit and bananas and the occasional dairy or produce item that wouldn’t last the month but you would be so surprised how long things last if you store them well!
We have a total food budget of around $600 a month, including food and litter for our two cats. If we want any coffees out etc, it has to come from there too so I usually try and keep our big monthly haul around $400 or as close to so we have some wiggle room.
If you’d like a post on how I’ve gotten our grocery budget down to this from $350-400 a fortnight, let me know in the comments!
Ok, ok, just tell me the meals already Steph!
I get my inspiration from a bunch of places, I can make a post on that too if you’d like. This month I’m trying to focus on more low GI/lower carb foods without getting too strict about it. I like these recipes because they’re pretty customisable in that regard so any quinoa will be replaced with rice for Matt!
Some of these recipes are on TikTok but you don’t have to have an account to view them 😊
Lunches
Buffalo Chicken Bake (using this as inspo, will likely tweak it)
Chicken Salad Pitas
Creamy Chicken, Rice & Veggie Soup - my own recipe here on Substack!
Veggie Loaded Pesto Chicken Pasta - my own recipe, coming to my Substack soon!
Dinners:
Sweet Potato, Lentil & Sausage Stew (using this link for inspo)
Roast Chicken
Quiche - my own recipe, coming to my Substack soon!
Pork Roast
Nandos Style Wraps - marinade from the freezer
Beef Pie - my own recipe, coming to my Substack soon!
Snacks
Home-made Granola with Yoghurt - still need to find some recipe inspo for this
Home-made Muesli Bars (for Matt) - my own recipe! It’s on TikTok but I’ll upload it here when I can
Muffins of some kind
And there ya have it! Meals for the whole month planned out and mostly shopped for. I’ll also ingredient prep as much as I can, dice up vegetables and meat where it’s needed etc.
I truly can’t emphasis enough how much this has absolutely saved my sanity this year and made meal time so much less stressful while also sticking closely to our budget.
That being said, be kind to yourself! I didn’t jump straight to this. I started out just working on our weekly budget a little, then I started shopping every two weeks and then stretched it out to monthly from there, making sure I was feeling at least somewhat comfortable with the previous step before making the next one.
Also, new stuff always feels a little weird when it’s new. Try things out and just be honest with yourself if it’s not working and you need to tweak something!
As always, if you’ve got any questions or anything else you’d like to see that would be helpful just let me know!
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