Your next steps are to:
1. Click on ‘Start Here‘ to watch the Welcome Video.
2. Check out ‘Your Bonuses‘ below.
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And if there’s anything I can help with please leave a comment below.
With love,
Jules x
WELCOME TO MASTER YOUR MEAL PLAN!
1. Click on ‘Start Here‘ to watch the Welcome Video.
2. Check out ‘Your Bonuses‘ below.
Hi Jules!
I was trying to go back and recap some of the in-deapth programs, including this one. But lunjs sre not working 🙁
Sorry Margaryta! I’ll get Caroline to fox them for you and email you when it’s done.
Hello, Jules–I love your videos. …going to try the Butter Bread today. It looks yummy. I’m wondering if in this course you discuss flavor pairings or what makes for delicious flavor such as acid, toasted nuts, wine, and such. Flavor pairings are a challenge for me. I don’t seem to get it right. Thank you.
Absolutely Lynne! We go really deep into flavour pairing in module 5… but if you want to get a head start just try to observe what other people do with flavour pairing when you’re eating out or reading recipes… For example this week my blog recipe was Chorizo & Kale so you could take note of that specific combo. To take it a step further you could remember that spicy / smoky pork goes well with greens! Jx
After having success with the simplicity of some of the recipes I am looking forwarding to ideas to help me sustain meal planning. I go really well for a couple of weeks and then life gets busy. I am only cooking for me but after long days at work sometimes it easier to boil a couple of eggs – at least they are free range ! 🙂
Yes cooking for one can be tough Janet! I found when I was single it really helped to reframe dinner time as a chance for some self care and relaxation- both the cooking and eating parts. A special time for me – oh how I miss those days now! jx
I keep coming back to this idea for buying groceries and getting meals on the table for a week. I find it works best when I don’t plan meals, then shop. For instance, I stopped by the produce stand and picked up fresh tomatoes, two handfuls of green beans, four ears of corn, some steamer new potatoes, a head of lettuce, green peppers, bell and poblanos. Then I decided on dinners. I pressure cooked a whole chicken I had in the freezer and served with mashed potatoes and corn, next meal is steamed green beans and potatoes, another meal is tostadas with refried beans made from ground up black beans, cheese and chicken with guacamole, I’ll make chicken salad for a meal. Next, a composed salad of green beans, hard boiled egg slices, sliced new potatoes, bacon and black olives. A Spanish omelet with poblanos, onions and a salsa from the tomatoes will work. A chicken, veg soup will use up the broth from the chicken and I will make a hash with veggies left over and a piece of steak I took home from a restaurant meal and froze. That’s a week or more of meals for twenty bucks and what I had in the pantry. I really love the ease of using the 2 minute plan which is the first lesson I took of yours. It’s simplicity is wonderful and works so well.
Wonderful Joan!
Thanks so much for sharing this… it’s really great to hear how your using this system!
Jx
Hi. I’m Shawnda, from California, USA, and I feel like I am a good cook when I have plenty of time, but I have a 6 month old baby, and have an unpredictable amount of time each day to cook. I also feel like my household tends to waste a lot of food. What I would like from my meal planning is to be able to cook simple, quick, elegant, healthy, and satisfying food for my family. I also want to incorporate food from my CSA subscription and garden, keep the grocery bills down, and not waste the food that I buy.
I know where you’re coming from Shawnda!
And congrats on your 6 month old 🙂
Jx
Hi all – I’m a mom of 2 (soon to be 3) with very little time for meal planning. Right now I’m pretty good at ad-hoc by necessity, but would like to get better and make it less stressful. We also get a great veggie box every week that I’d love to use more of – sometimes I’m intimidated by things because they look hard or time consuming and they end up going to waste.
Wonderful Meagan!
And congrats on your new little one.
If you have any specific ingredients you need help with in your veggie box, let me know and I’ll see if I can help find an easy way to use them so they don’t go to waste:)
Jx
Hello from California! I grew up with almost no fresh fruits and veggies in our diets and a non-existent family dinner time. With my own young family now, I’d like to break the cycle and learn how to better put healthy, easy meals on the table. Right now 5:30pm rolls around and we are scrambling to get something to fill bellies before bedtime. Argh! I want to do better for myself and my family.
Hi Suzi!
That’s awesome that you have setup a family dinner tradtion for your family. I have a friend who is a psychiatrist and she does a lot of work with women with eating disorders and she was telling me that it’s rare to find someone with an eating disorder who grew up in a family who ate dinner together most nights. Family meals are soo important! Good for you.
Jx
I have had good luck trying a few of your recipes (yum!), now I need to learn how to use your ideas on a daily basis. I want to increase my healthy eating so it becomes routine, not so hit and miss. I love the simplicity of fewer ingredients.
GReat Gayle!
Looking to improve my type 2 diabetic meal planning. Have fairly good blood sugars but sometimes I find myself with too little carbs. Would like to be introduced to a variety of carbs and recipes.
Hi Melanie!
If you need more carbs that are low GI, legumes are your friend! You might like to check out the ‘Reclaim Your Waistline’ class next because it focuses on using beans and lentils.
Jx
Although I’ve had several meal goals for the past year or so–weekly meal planning, freezer meals stocked away, organized pantry, eliminating (as much as possible) food waste, drastically reducing restaurant meals–I’m not yet where I’d like to be with these goals. With this class I’d like to be super confident in my abilities to come up with a yummy meal using whatever I have on hand. I ladore pouring over recipes, but I easily overwhelm myself with so many good choices and often end up without solid plans and therefore, without solid meals.
That’s great Samantha!
Remember it’s all about starting small with one goal at a time 🙂
Jx
While I haven’t been able to follow properly as always, life seems to get in the way, this time my Mom passed away and I had to get back to Canada from Hong Kong rather quickly. That said – I have read the notes while ‘on the road’ and been playing with food combos for a little while now. Every week I get a ‘mystery box’ of organic veg from a local farm and have to come up with meals based around what I get. Sometimes I reach for a book but thanks to your great guides more often than not I just make it up on the fly- to 99.9% success! Thanks for giving my wings the confidence to ‘wing it’!
Hi Daphne
I’m so sorry to hear about your Mom. I hope you’re doing OK.
And very glad to hear about your 99.9% success rate. Go girl!
Jx
Bonjour! I finally got a chance to sit down and start the course! When our son is in bed I’m going to get a notebook out and start writing down where I am at now with cooking, what I want to achieve and what steps I am going to take each day. Small ones!!!! We are so blessed in being able to grow our own vegetables, so in season organic veggies are no problem. Fish and meat are too expensive for us to have each day but we get given tinned fish and sometimes frozen odds and ends of fish from the food bank. Just don’t go into asking what it is or comprises of….it’s fish….! I have got my hubby eating lentils and chickpeas, now I need to find healthy food for our fastidious son. He can’t be forced to eat, just gently persuaded. I have written to my cousin to make my commitment….she is a research chef in the USA…I’m aiming high here! I would love to cook something as healthy as possible with whatever ends up in my kitchen instead of just staring and thinking ‘what do I do with it?’ and end up boiling it to death…… I want to learn to cook and you have already taught me how to poach an egg!!! Yay! I’m in poached egg heaven now!!!! I also want to alleviate the stress factor… I have lost around 15kg in weight so far, about 2 more kilos to go but I need to sort out health problems and I think eating healthier will be a major factor! Hubby needs to lose quite a bit of weight and get healthier….we are older parents, (our son is 7 and was born when I was 45yo…our first and only child), and I hit the big ‘M’ a few months after having him. So we need the energy to keep up with our son and be healthier to look after him. I know you won’t disappoint with your course and I am so excited about being on it. Thank you so much!!!!! x
I took this class before, but it was so good I’m taking it again. 😉
This time around, my goal is to be able to better utilize produce sales at the grocery store, and seasonally available items at market.
Welcome back Katrina!
And that’s an awesome goal 🙂
Just starting today so not yet on the method – on a strict medical ketogenic diet that does involve planning, ratios and strict weighing along with checking my blood sugar and blood ketones daily, it’s been quite a lot of work, and fitting in cooking for my husband and daughter as well has been difficult at best – I tried hiring a chef to help develop recipes but she was unfamiliar with the diet and it did not go well, and for the small amount of money I have to allocate to help, it was not going to work. My biggest challenge is to make tasty sauces that “stand up” with the high amounts of fat called for, rather than run all over the plate requiring a straw to get all the fat consumed that is called for. I am slowly getting a handle on that with aioli’s, emulsions, etc. I hope to finish this week’s plan with my meals and variations on them for my family, for which we have already shopped, and then shift to the MYMP method for their meals the following week, which I hope will decrease the work load quite a bit. One challenge is to time it around the CSA delivery which arrives every Wednesday and is unknown ingredients until then, while I do my menu planning on Friday/Sat so weekend batch cooking can be done enlisting my husband’s help. Very excited about the idea of becoming a more intuitive, less recipe-driven cook, and hope in future when I’m better I’ll be able to use this method for my own cooking as well.
Wow Teresa!
Thanks for sharing your story. The ketogenic diet sounds interesting… Is it just keeping everything super low carb or is there more too it?
If you’re looking for high fat sauces do a search for cheats hollandaise and bernaise
Jx
Hi Jules,
The medical ketogenic diet was first developed to treat children with epilepsy who were not controlled with medications. It involves very low protein and carbs, such that (protein in grams + carbs in grams) x 4 = fat in grams. It takes a lot of modifications to get recipes to work, since I don’t have culinary experience to know how ingredients work proportionally together, and I don’t have a good sense of measurements.
I have been working with hollandaise, I had read that it doesn’t store/reheat without breaking emulsion, although I have been finding I can gently rewarm it without noticeable difference to my eye. Bernaise is next on my list. I have a few things on my to-do-list to try, including a sage emulsion. It’s tricky to find things to make them emulsify, since egg increases the protein and carb; flours and starches are out; I’ve tried mustard but can’t get enough of it to soak up all the oil without becoming way too mustardy; someone suggested I try nutritional yeast but have’t gotten the hang of that either. I also would love to get some kind of coconut emulsion – the curries etc don’t lead to emulsions, in fact the masters of those cooking seem prefer separation of the oil as a sign that they are truly done – so I haven’t been able to figure that out yet either (although using the fatty part of the coconut milk tends to help a bit.) Anyway, any suggestions for any of this are quite welcome!
Oh, and just for the sake of completeness, since you asked, the medical keto diet is also a restricted calorie diet – still figuring out how restricted it needs to be, but carbs per meal (3 meal per day) are supposed to be around 1 gr, or vanishingly small! i’m on a 1200 kilocal menu daily, and also rotate foods for reducing immune simulation, on a 5 day cycle. Some people are finding they can still maintain results with 80 grams of the right carbs a day – not sure what the total calories would be – but that’s not the strict medical version of the ketogenic diet. I’ll eventually be cycling between a stricter and a less strict version of the diet, since the strict version is clearly unbalanced.
Wow interesting Teresa!
Thanks for enlightening me.
Hi Teresa!
I’d recommend making my cheats hollandaise which uses butter and oil… The oil stops it solidifying so you can store it without needing to reheat.
Hope that helps!
Jx
My husband and I went to the grocery store and with a switch in our intentions. Instead of following a strict grocery list, we found our designated amount of proteins and beautiful vegetables. Usually we’d keep our eyes glued to the list more than the look or feel of the veggies. It was so fun to see my husband pick the veggies based on what looked appealing and fresh. It was scary, too, could I really just “whip something up?”
Low and behold Friday night came along and what were we to make? I used the decision tree to help me decide on a curry, and from there used the template recipe to guide and build a recipe with ingredients we were prepared for. IT WAS DELICIOUS!!! And this morning, SUCCESS on poached eggs. So excited. So grateful. So FULL! Thank you 🙂
That is awesome Grace! So glad you took the leap!
Isn’t shopping so much more fun this way?
Jx
I like simple recipes too. Plus, I’m vegetarian (started 2 months ago), but my husband isn’t. This is starting to cause ‘discussion’ about what to fix/eat. I like how you always list options for vegetarians in your recipes. I also like flexibility in what to fix.
Hi Paula!
I don’t think you’re alone with the veg/non-veg ‘discussions’ in your house. Hope this style of cooking helps make it a little easier for you
J
I am at a new point in my life. I have one child left at home and he will soon be on his own. I want my husband and I to eat more healthy and get rid of the junk food in our house. It is time to take care of ourselves and better our health. I have been a strict menu planner for many years and even have a monthly plan made up for our family. It is no longer functional for us. I have been diagnosed with insulin resistance and need to severely limit my carb intake. I love whole foods and want some better ideas on how to use them without letting them go to waste. I look forward to learning some new ways of meal planning.
Welcome Tonya!
Love that you’ve been a strict menu planner and are looking for a new (and better!) way.
You’re in the right place!
J
I’m really looking forward to this! I’ve been a food rut and I want to get into a good habit of fixing simple veg + vegetarian protein + slow carb meals. I love to cook and have a bunch of cookbooks, but often get turned off by the long list of ingredients or the anticipation of having a big mess to wash in the kitchen afterward.
Welcome Lisa!
And yay for short ingredients list… and little clean up
J
I rely heavily on recipes in the kitchen, and hope this course gives me the confidence to think for myself when it comes to cooking for my family. I also hope this course helps me to find the joy in cooking, rather than it being just another chore. And boy, there are a lot of women out there giving up sugar…must…read …sweet ..poison!
Maudie!
You’re in the right place for gaining confidence and finding some joy in cooking…
I’d put Sweet Poison on the backburner for now… we need to get you having some fun first!
J
I am wasting way too much food and not eating particularly well. I love food, and use it to explore different cultures, but cooking a whole recipe for 4 can leave me with more food than I want to eat again and again. This course should bring some method to the madness.
Great Susan!
You’ll notice that the template recipes are written ‘per person’ so you can easily adapt to suit how many you’re cooking for… should help with your waste problem
J
Yes! Unless I have a new cookbook to explore…
Great Susan!
Have a smile on my face reading the comments as I too in April have elimated sugar after reading the sweet poison book. Whilst being more aware of what I am eating I somehow landed on Jules website and began trying some of the ideas. It was after really enjoying substituting grated cauliflower for rice when eating curries that I decided this is a way of using vegetables that I really want to know more about as I so often go for carbs and sugar over vegetables. Am looking forward to the next five weeks.
Glad we’ve got you onto cauliflower rice Bronwyn!
I think the easiest way to eat healthier is to replace your carbs with veg 🙂
I’m smiling because I just finished three weeks of Lyn-Genet’s “The Plan” which is similar to an elimination diet (that Robin mentioned) and I’m ready to add more food back in as well. Also, two of my daughters have different food allergies/sensitivities, so I’m looking forward to simplifying our meals, instead of making three different suppers, so that everyone can have a safe, yummy meal.
Great Bobbie Jo!
I haven’t heard of Whole30, but I’ve just read David Gillespie’s Sweet Poison & am on my 2nd attempt to eliminate sugar – sneaky, addictive stuff! I too have noticed the huge difference it makes not having it in my diet – more energy, less moody etc. Quite amazing! amazing enough to battle the horrible withdrawals!
Anyway, back to Stonesoup. I have read the 1st version of MYMP & am currently doing about 50/50 meal planning to template recipes. I hope to become better at thinking about what I want for dinner – ‘cookers block’. Maybe I need a flow chart for me at the end of the day when I’m brain dead…Is it cold?…yes…do I want a soup, curry or hearty meal?…etc. Anyone else with no ability to think at the end of day? Learning more about flavour pairings might help too.
I’m looking forward to being a more flexible cook!
Nicole!
I haven’t read Sweet Poison but it’s on my list.. Glad to hear eliminating sugar is helping you.
Great suggestion around helping to actually make the decision what to cook. Thanks!
Jx
Thanks for sharing Robin!
I’m intrigued by the Whole30… haven’t come across it before..
Welcome to the class!
J
Excellent timing on this class. I’ve just finished a 30-day elimination diet (basically I followed Whole30 with some personal tweeks) and am about to start adding foods back in. I simplified the elimination diet so I could stick with it so, in a sense, I followed the first part of your plan – I didn’t plan, I just shopped knowing what I could eat. However, I am getting restless and bored with my very very plain meals and don’t want to lose the benefits of the past 30 days by eating a bunch of crap. Template recipes sound perfect for me so I’m looking forward to the class.
Hey Robin,
I had the same issue with the Whole30! Near the end, I got very proficient at marinating and cooking a hunk of meat and adding steamed or roasted vegs on the side…but…it was getting pretty repetitive. I’m glad I’m not the only person that found that. (There was, of course, a lot of good in the Whole30 — like realizing how deeply sugar affected my body and mind, and how sneaky my brain was about trying to get me to eat it!)