Meal Planning during the World cup Fever

So have you been watching the football World Cup? We have and we have been loving it. What I think has helped us to enjoy it, even more, is the lovely British Summer we have been having. In fact, it has been so hot on some days that we hardly feel the need, urge, nor inclination to cook.

Don’t get me wrong; we have never gone to bed hungry!

I’ll share with you a list of some of the things we’ve been eating.

Before I do that, however, just a word for the money-wise among us on the benefits of meal planning.

Benefits of meal planning

• The most important benefit for me is that we save money on grocery shopping and also on utilities
• It prevents too much mental fatigue of having to decide every day what to make for dinner
• We eat healthier because things are planned and we don’t just rely on eating the junk we sometimes have a craving for
• There is much less wastage of food as we only buy the ingredients for the dishes we have planned. Also when we have any food left over (and I do mean anything), we make sure it is properly cooled down and refrigerated or frozen. And that food always comes in handy to help with another meal or even to be a meal for one.
• With meal planning, you can experiment more with trying out new recipes and developing your skills
• Fewer takeaways and more home cooked meals mean you can make your own takeaway style meals which you will enjoy more.

There are many more benefits to meal planning as outlined in this post. Numbers four and five are my favourites too.

Anyway, things have been heating up around here so here are the meals we have made to help to compensate.

Our meals this week

• vegan barbecue consisting of vegetable kebabs, the best vegan burger I know, roasted corn on the cob, a fresh lovely salad of pomegranate, avocados and satsumas and roasted sweet potatoes. All of this was done on Sunday evening when the sun was going down (much cooler) so wasn’t too stressful to make in the heat. In fact, it was done on the grill in the back garden 
• Enough of the fabulous barbecue was left to serve for dinner the next day 
• We cooked enough pasta (early in the morning) and used it to make dinner for two days. The first was a cold pasta salad made with red ripe and juicy cherry tomatoes, grated cheese, grated carrots and sweetcorn.
• The following day, the leftover pasta was used to make tuna, pasta and sweetcorn with grated red onions and mayonnaise.
• We had half of a jerk chicken in the freezer from the week before when we did our Aldi inspired Jamaican jerk BBQ, along with some leftover frozen rice to make a delicious fried rice dinner that was the best ever (you should try it if you ever have some jerk chicken left over one day). Use my free jerk marinade recipe to make your own.
• The rest of the chicken was used as an additional topping on a store bought Margherita pizza.

So this week we made some awesome meals without spending too much time in the heat of the kitchen. All the better for us as we had more time for each other and more time to soak up the atmosphere of the world cup.

Come on England!

By the way, we need some more inspiration for other vegan dishes that we can try. So, if you know of one or two that you particularly love, send them our way. We heard about some kind of tortilla soup and I can’t wait to try it.

This week we are linking with Katy and Naomi of The Organised Life Project.