If this sounds all too familiar, meal planning can prevent it. Meal planning plays an important role in ensuring you and your family enjoy a healthy balanced diet. It also alleviates the daily stress of deciding what’s for dinner, puts a stop to the constant trips to the shops and saves you money.

We’ve developed a few tips to help you and your family (the kids will love to get involved) plan your meals and enjoy fresh, natural and healthy produce.

1) Sit down and work out what you would like your weekly plan to include in general terms. For example, each week would you like to have one stirfry meal, a pasta meal, a slow cooker/soup meal, a salad, steak or mince beef meal etc. This template will vary depending on how much meat you like to eat, your budget, household and likes/dislikes.

2) Think about maximising some cheaper cuts of meat, as well as treating yourself to some premium cuts. The slow cooker is a great way to turn things like lamb shoulder, gravy beef, osso bucco, chuck and ribs into family favourites.

3) Decide on a handful of dinners that your family will enjoy regularly. These can form the foundation of your meal plan and rotate onto your dinner table every week or two. You might decide on 10 dinners, for example, that you use once every two weeks. This would leave two dinners a week to add variety to your meal plan and try new recipes and flavours.

4) Once you’ve decided on the look and feel of your meal plan, considered how you might use different cuts to stretch your protein dollars and developed your core dinner recipes, it’s time to buy what you need. With our online ordering and free home delivery service, we would encourage you to order on Wednesday nights for Friday/Saturday delivery. This allows you to pick up your fresh fruit and vegetables on Saturday morning and kick off your first dinner for the week that night.

Nutrition Australia has some useful meal plan templates and recipes that might help you further here.

The post Step-by-step meal planning guide appeared first on Castle Estate Food Co.

Rather than venting how many producers fall well short of meeting customers’ expectations, we thought we’d just let you know what the term means to us at our farm.

The team at Koallah Farm is now growing our own meat birds on our property near Camperdown in south-west Victoria.

All our poultry live in our paddocks – protected from predators by Saydi our trusted Maremma (pictured below). The chickens can do whatever they want, all the time. We don’t even lock them up at night time.

This means our chickens are genuine ‘pasture-raised’ chickens as they can eat grass and roots and forage for bugs, worms, larvae and more. They also benefit from lots of natural sunlight.

Although we still provide a feed pellet for additional nutrition, the natural proteins and minerals from our rich volcanic paddocks are essential in growing healthy, fully-feathered chickens with thicker skins and darker, stronger-flavoured meat.

It takes us a full 12 weeks to grow our chickens and it’s worth the wait. As you can see, they develop quite differently with much more muscle in the legs from roaming around.

There’s no doubting you can taste the difference. Pastured chicken is much less watery, not quite as soft and has a distinctly earthier and more gamey flavour.

If you cook it a bit slower you’ll release all the natural flavour and we think you’ll love it.

Keep an eye on the website for more Koallah Farm-listed chicken products. At the moment, we’ve started with whole birds, but very soon we’ll be able to provide all your favourite cuts as well.

The post Have you tasted real chicken? appeared first on Castle Estate Food Co.