Weekly meal planning

Its been a good year so far.. with a new job and an on-going inspiration to loose weight albeit not a new year resolution! My life has been surrounded with lots of new interesting work challenges and equally challenging planning of meals. I say challenging because if I want to get done with a hour-long work-out in the evening, I am left with only 45 mins to get our dinner ready. Don't ask me why and how only 45 mins..lets just say we prefer to finish dinner before 8.30.. 9.00 pm tops!

With that in mind, deciding what to make for at least 4 nights in the week does get to be a task! Much till the mid feb, I would decide the dinner of the day based off my mood aka whatever came to my mind then. Now you can understand that such a schedule would definitely not work out to be best! I would end up with recipes that took much longer than 45 mins or too much left overs.

But after reading this post by Nupur at One Hot Stove, I was totally inspired. What came to mind was instead of writing down each day what we had for dinner, I much rather create a small meal plan for the week! That way I would not only have time to think about dinner in advance (over the weekend) but it would also make sure I have minimal wastage of produce!

I usually do get overly excited about such ideas and so this time I decided to take it slow. For the first week, I decided only on a couple of recipes and checked how the plan rolled out. Fortunately I made it through the week with success and last weekend I finally made a concrete dinner plan for the coming weekdays, 4 days of eating-in!

Below is what we had for the past week:

Mon 3/4 - Rava(Semolina) Idli with Coconut chutney
Tues 3/5 - Sweet potato curry with Vari tandul (Jungle rice) and cucumber raita
Wed 3/6 - Ordered Pizza ( originally planned for Noodles with tofu and bell-pepper)
Thurs 3/7 - Masoor Pulao with Tomato-Cucumber raita
Fri 3/8 - Left-over pulao with snacks

So to compensate for the earlier planned noodles, I made the noodles for lunch today with a side of steamed edamame! Yumm! :)

It wont be a surprise to you guys if I say that reading through food blogs is truly therapeutic for me and I do that for at least 10% of my each day. With that I end up having a plethora of recipes and definitely love to find those which are quick, healthy and delicious! So the upcoming week's meal plan does have such inspirations sprinkled through it! :)
In the hope of still managing through this plan, I am posting my meal plan in advance and will surely report back what happens through the week. So here is the plan:

Mon 3/11 - Moong curry with chapatis and tomato raita
Tues 3/12 - Besan pithla with chapatis and Snehal's peanut chutney.
Wed 3/13 - Fusili with pesto and veggies
Thurs 3/14 - Puliogare rice with black grams and side salad
Fri 3/15 - Eat out!

I am totally stoked by the whole idea and just hope this works well for the upcoming months! Planning this definitely makes my life easy through the week and helps me waste less and in fact save some money! I am sure if executed even more strictly one can easily have a lean weekly budget set for meals! I would surely be interested in hearing what you guys think about this and if you have an such ideas up your sleeve!

Have a good weekend everyone!