A Month Off

This April, I've taken a month off from menu planning.  It's been wonderful.  Although I do enjoy knowing what I'm making each day, sometimes it can get a little repetitive and uninspiring.  I didn't intend to take a month off, but I just couldn't face planning the menu in advance and took a slightly more ad hoc approach for a change.

Having been away for a few days, I've come back feeling a lot more inspired and looking forward to getting back to cooking our meals.  I still haven't planned a menu as such, but I have done the food shopping this morning and bought sufficient options to last us the rest of the week and possibly until the end of the month, save for topping up on a few items next week.

I shopped in a few different places to my normal shop too, which made it a lot more fun, checking out what was available in a different store.  I had a £5 off a £40 shop at Tesco voucher, plus a voucher to get £1.23 off my next shop after we bought some more Easter eggs from one of their stores whilst away at the weekend, plus another £1 clubcard voucher off some meat purchases - so I did pretty well on the shop and spent less than £50 in all despite buying quite a lot of meat for ourselves and the dog, a couple of items for the food bank, heaps of fresh fruit, salad and veg from a market stall and even a few slightly more expensive treats from M&S.  It made a pleasant change.

I'm going to enjoy the remainder of my month off before starting to think about a menu plan for May.  I'm hoping to include a few new dishes next month, that I haven't tried before, so a bit of recipe book reading is now the order of the day.