Menu Planning to Control Eating-Out

Baked Farfalle

I’m a big foodie who loves to try anything vegetarian. And I also cannot be hungry (seriously!). So, I have this urge to eat out whenever I see my favorite restaurants. My main problem is to control my hunger and appetite when I go out. We have a monthly “restaurant budget” in our home and we cannot go out of that budget (I hate to lose control on something and feel ashamed after the short pleasure. It’s the reason I started this blog).

The things that cracks me up is, all of us in the family are foodie and none of them except me don’t hesitate to eat out (they couldn’t care less about budget). The only person who wants to spend within the budget is me. So, I have to control me before controlling everyone in the family.

Then I found this menu planning idea from the web and started implementing it in our family. Out menu planning is quite relaxed. We don’t include the recipes in menu planning. Instead, we plan using the groceries we bought that week from the grocery store.

How does it help?

Since we can go to the grocery store only once a week, I have to be creative in cooking even if we miss to buy one or two ingredients

I also have to plan my grocery shopping extensively to cover all the items I need the following week

Since my family already know that whatever we bought that week in grocery store is final, they’d let me know their wants the previous week itself. It helps me plan my week ahead of time

I get creative in recipes and come up with new recipes based on my family’s tastes. For example, my husband requested me to make pineapple pizza for dinner yesterday. I neither had pizza sauce nor pineapple.

Since I didn’t want to fully disappoint him, I decided to make something italian. All I had in hand was, Farfalle pasta and variety of cheese.

I cooked the paste, added olive oil, left-over pesto, pepper, feta cheese, parmesan cheese, mozzarella cheese and and olives in the paste, mix it well and baked at 400 C for 15 mins. A crispy, delicious dinner ready.

I served it with canned tomato soup. I should say, my family loved the meal.

How to plan the shopping:

I use my iPhone to enter the items that I’m going to buy the next week. I tried different iPhone apps previousy. But none of them worked as good as iPhone notes.

Rule: Buy whatever you enter in your notes. If an item is not in the list, don’t buy it.

Always have extra packs of basic essentials. For example, we always have enough stock of milk, curd (yogurt), and banana at home.

Hence, even if you miss some of the items, you don’t have to run to the store during the week.

How to menu plan:

I use pinterest to pin all my favorite recipes. I sometimes look for recipes based on ingredients on hand. But mostly, if I have enough vegetables and seasonings at home, I can come up with anything that my family likes (well, most of the time)