Sometimes I don’t post a meal plan – sometimes that’s because I simply forgot to blog it and other times it’s because I didn’t write one in the first place.

Meal planning is a funny old thing, some weeks I enjoy it, other weeks it is utterly tedious and then there are the weeks where it feels like fighting a dragon – it’s an enormous task laden with responsibility.

Yeah, a dragon.

Writing the meal plan for the week isn’t just plucking seven meals from the air and putting them on a list – it involves studying the calendar for the week to work out how many of us are going to be eating and how long I actually have to prepare/cook and how long we have to eat between after-school clubs and events, you have to look at the recipe for each meal and write your shopping list to include it all plus snacks and breakfast items (and other household stuff you need in the shopping) and make sure it fits within your budget for that week.

The entire family relies on you to have breakfast things in the cupboards every morning, a tasty lunch for wherever they need to eat it and a tasty meal put down in front of them every evening. That’s a big responsibility dragon when you are conscious of it.

It really depends on my mental health at the time whether I notice the dragon lurking or not.

The last few weeks the it has been sleeping and it’s all been fine but this week it roared at me and I saw how big it was and I panicked.

So there isn’t a meal plan as such this week, I just bought all the usual staples for the week plus a selection of easy-cook bits and bobs for the freezer and a selection of vegetables. I will make it up as I go along and if that means a week of chicken nuggets and pasta-with-cheese-and-peas then so be it. It won’t kill us.

Amber is fine though, she has a cupboard full of cat food and a freezer drawer full of portions of raw chicken to keep her happy!