Meal planning by cuisine

There are loads of approaches to meal planning, and many people use a combination of them. In this post, we look at meal planning by cuisine.

When we talk about meal planning by cuisine we mean choosing a country and theming your meals around the food of that area. For example, over summer I have a particular thing for Mexican food. So, it is Mexican Monday for a month, where the whole family knows what’s for dinner each Monday. We chose bean quesadillas, tacos, nachos (using the doubled up cooking from bean quesadillas) and chilli con carne for our four Monday meals that month (of course this summer we may need to swap to Taco Tuesday to take inspiration from The Lego Movie™)!

The same can apply to other nights, where we have pasta night one night a week. To break up the monotony, it is nice to have some vegetarian options, fish and meat amongst these nights. If pasta night is Thursday night, we do spaghetti bolognese, tuna pasta, penne napolitana or macaroni cheese, and lasagne or cannelloni using our food banked bolognese sauce.

We also do some Asian cooking with fried rice, Asian beef mince, pork cutlets in Asian marinade and Chicken hokkien noodles. Generally, much of Asian cooking is fast and fresh so I tend to do it on nights when we have a lot of after-school activities.

Taking a cuisine theme to your meal planning is a great way to try new cuisine and take an inexpensive around the world tour with the family.

What’s your favourite approach to meal planning?