I’m going to share my New Years Resolutions with you over the next week or two. My resolutions are normally of the ‘must lose weight’ variety (which given that I’ve had three children in the last 5 years, you can understand). But happily my weight seems to have stabilised respectably at about 9 stone 9-ish which I’m pretty happy with. So I can strike that one off the list.

I’ve got a few things I’d like to focus on this year. The first one is mostly related to food:

I resolve to have three meat free days per week and plan all meals in advance!

I’m distinctly trying to eat less meat for various reasons. Firstly it will ensure that we all eat more veggies which is a GOOD THING. Secondly there’s the whole global warming issue – rearing livestock creates large amounts of CO2 that growing veg doesn’t.

We don’t have meat every night anyway so the meat free element of this resolution should actually be fairly easy. My menu for this week had Jacket Potato for one night (with cheese / coleslaw / beans) and Goats Cheese & Tapenade Pasta for another. Home-made Pizza rounds off the week and I’m happy to stick with veggie options for that too. Thankfully my children are usually pretty happy to eat their veg, although no1 son picked every bit of spinach out of his pasta last night…ggrrr.

I’m also going to do a menu plan every week and use up what’s in my freezer. Menu planning is great, but with Christmas etc I’ve fallen out of the habit of sitting down every Thursday / Friday and planning for the week ahead. It saves me money, it saves me time and energy and I WILL do it every week. That way I’ll avoid having a fridge full of stuff that’s going off because it hasn’t been used. I’ll be able to do little bits of preparation when I’ve got a spare moment in advance of the evening meal (if necessary). And I’ll still have tasty, scrumptious meals. Putting it that way and it almost sounds like fun!