Monday 21 January 2013

Monday Meal Planning in the snow

I have been slacking off on the Monday meal planning recently but the threat (and subsequent arrival!) of the snow forced me to be a bit more organised. Given the choice between trekking through the snow to the supermarket accompanied by the Little Princess, or doing an online shop, I chose the latter - and thanks to the Sainsbury's delivery man making it through the snow this morning, I now have both a fully stocked fridge and a proper meal plan.

This week I am continuing my quest to cook more new recipes, re-visiting the speed cooking with one of the Jamie's 15 Minute Meals that I have already tried (20 minutes and 4 seconds to beat) and adding a few old favourites for those after work dinners when I can't be bothered spending a lot of time in the kitchen.

So, here is this week's plan

Tonight - Greek chicken with herby couscous and homemade tzatziki (from Jamie's 15 Minute Meals)
Tuesday - Teriyaki beef stir-fry with veg and noodles
Wednesday - Pasta with Lamb Ragu (from Nigellisima - this week's new recipe)
Thursday - Thai Red Prawn Curry with saffron rice
Friday - Chicken Fajitas (from Jamie's Ministry of Food - a real favourite in this house, thanks to Mrs M for reminding me!)
Saturday - still tbc
Sunday - a roast of some description, am thinking chicken at the moment...

Let's just hope I can stay being organised!






Sunday 6 January 2013

New Years Resolutions

Every year I have the same resolutions - lose some weight, exercise more, don't spend so much money on things we don't need, make more effort to keep the house tidy. To be fair, I do usually lose some weight (in the first part of the year anyway, when I've got a sunshine holiday to aim for), I exercise fairly regularly and I 'try' to do the other two things but usually don't succeed. So, this year I am going for a new approach of setting myself some mini goals along the way. These aren't going to be big, dramatic resolutions. They will just be a few little things that I'd like to achieve each month and will hopefully make me feel more positive about myself.

So, for January I would like to;

Cook Six New Recipes - I have got a shelf literally over-flowing with cookery books and one of my aims for this year is to widen my range of meals as we often find ourselves eating the same old favourites time and time again. So far, on day 6, I have only done one new recipe - Cajun Chicken, Smashed Sweet Potatoes and Fresh Corn Salsa (from Jamie's 15 Minute Meals) which we really enjoyed, so next week I will be adding at least one new thing into our meal plan.

Run 40K - Hopefully if I achieve this goal; I will be well on the way to getting back into running regularly again. So far I have done 9K which is a good start.

Create Four Scrapbook Pages - I love scrapbooking but since the Little Princess dropped her afternoon nap, it is one of those things that has fallen by the wayside a bit. I have a huge stack of lovely photos from last year, a cupboard full of fabulous materials (including birthday and Christmas presents which I am waiting to try out), a new scrapbook to fill and I just need to get on with putting our memories down on paper. So, I am aiming for one page a week this month - and hopefully, 52 pages in the year!

Start the Great Declutter - Unlike the other three resolutions, this one is a bit vague. We have a lot of projects that we'd like to do in the house this year and, to do that, we need to create more space. So this month I am going to start decluttering - just haven't decided what to tackle first!

And, on top of that, I'd like to lose 7lbs (if I ever buy some new scales) and blog more.... that should be enough to get going with.