How to Meal Plan for the Week

Why Most Meal Plans Fall Apart

The reasons repeat, and none of them are about willpower.

• Seven dinners is too many. Someone works late, someone eats at a friend’s, a Friday turns into takeout. Plan for all seven and two bags of salad go soft in the drawer, which feels like your failure rather than the plan’s.
• Every evening is treated as the same evening. A Tuesday with forty minutes and a tired household is not a Saturday, and a plan that ignores that puts the long braise on the worst night of the week.
• It assumes a good week. Any plan that survives only when nothing goes wrong gets abandoned the first time something does.
• The shopping ignores the kitchen. You buy the third jar of cumin and miss the rice, because the list came from the recipes and nobody looked in the cupboard.
• Every dinner is a new recipe. Cooking something the first time costs attention: reading it through, measuring, checking whether the pan looks right. Five of those in a week is a lot to ask of a Wednesday.

Fix those five and the plan stops being a test you can fail.

Step 1: Start With the Week You Actually Have

Write the seven days down the left of a page and leave room next to each.

Now cross out the nights that are already spoken for. The night you get home at nine. The night the kids eat at their grandparents’. Anything already decided, including the takeout you know is coming, gets crossed out before you plan a single dinner.

Next to the nights that are left, write how many people are eating and roughly how long you will have. Twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour if you feel like it. Accuracy does not matter here, honesty does, because that number decides whether the plan survives contact with a Tuesday.

Two minutes of this usually takes two or three nights out of the problem. Everything after it is planning for a shorter week, which is the week you have.

Step 2: Decide How Many Dinners You Need

Count the nights you did not cross out. Then take two more off.

One is for leftovers. If you cook for four on a night when three are eating, most of another dinner is already sitting in the fridge, and planning a fresh one on top of it is how food gets thrown away.

The other is a night off, scheduled in advance, where the answer is eggs, toast, cereal, or whatever your household does when nobody wants to cook. Write it into the plan and it stops feeling like the plan breaking.

What is usually left is three to five dinners, and that is the number this routine is built around. Three feels thin until you cook the first one and notice that a pan of something usually covers two nights. If three to five sounds like giving up, compare it with the last plan you wrote for seven.

Step 3: Choose by Constraint First, Appetite Second

Most of us start from what we feel like eating, then find out on Wednesday that it takes an hour and an ingredient from a store that closes at six. Turn the order around. Ask the constraints first and let appetite choose between whatever is left standing.

• Time first. Match each dinner to the minutes you wrote next to that night. The twenty minute night gets pasta, eggs, a stir fry, or a tray of sausages and vegetables in the oven. The long night gets the thing that wants an hour.
• Then what is cheap and good right now. Whatever is in season is usually both. Build one dinner around whatever is piled up at the front of the produce section or the market stall.
• Then the refusals. Every household has them. If one person will not eat mushrooms, a mushroom dinner is an argument with a side of rice. Write the hard nos down once and stop proposing them.
• Appetite last. By now you are choosing between four or five dinners that all fit the week, so pick the ones you want to eat. It is the enjoyable part, and it works better at the end.

Put the chosen dinners next to the nights they fit. You can swap them later. The point is to see the whole week at once.

Step 4: Repeat Meals on Purpose

New recipes are the most expensive thing in any plan. They cost reading time and unfamiliar ingredients, and they add the small stress of not knowing what the pan is supposed to look like. A week of them is a week of expensive nights.

Households that keep meal planning going tend to cook the same eight or ten dinners over and over in a different order. Those get faster every time, and you know what to buy for them without looking anything up.

Write your own rotation down once: the dinners you can already cook without reading anything. Most people reach eight or ten faster than they expect, and the ones that feel too obvious to write down are usually the ones carrying the week.

Then add at most one new recipe a week, on a night with time in it. If it works it joins the rotation. If it does not, you lost one evening. Cooking the same dinner twice in a month costs you nothing, and restaurants keep a menu for a reason.

Step 5: Write the List by Aisle and Merge Duplicates

Now turn three to five dinners into one list.

Go through the dinners one at a time and write down everything each one needs, with amounts. You will end up with a messy column and several things written twice, which is the raw material.

Then merge the duplicates. If two dinners want onions, write onions once with both amounts added together. If one wants a bunch of parsley and the other a few sprigs, one bunch covers both. Every duplicate you miss is a duplicate you buy.

Then group what is left by where it sits in the store instead of by the dinner it came from. Produce together, dairy together, meat and fish together, cans and dry goods together, frozen together, everything else at the end. A list in recipe order sends you back across the store three times, which is where the extra twenty minutes and the impulse buys come from. We have a longer piece on writing a list by aisle.

One more habit is worth the ten seconds: write next to each line which dinner it belongs to. Then Thursday falls through, you look at the list, and you know what to leave on the shelf.

Step 6: Check the Fridge and the Cupboard Before You Leave

Take the list and walk to the kitchen. Open the fridge, the cupboard and the freezer, and cross off anything you already have.

This is the step people skip, and it pays immediately. It is how you stop owning four bottles of soy sauce and no rice.

While you are in there, look for the things that want using: half a bag of spinach, the yogurt nobody opened, the peppers going soft in the drawer. Write them at the top of the page and build one of the week’s dinners around them. A plan that starts from the kitchen wastes less than one that starts from a recipe.

If you cannot tell what is in there, spend five extra minutes once. Pull everything to the front of the shelf, look at it, put it back.

Step 7: Cook the Most Perishable Things First

You bought the whole week in one trip, so the order you cook in matters.

The dinners with the delicate things go early: fresh fish, salad greens, soft herbs, ripe tomatoes, anything that looked best on the day you bought it. The sturdy things go later. Root vegetables, cabbage, onions, potatoes and anything out of a can, a jar or the freezer will wait without complaining.

This costs nothing. It is the same dinners in a different order, and it decides whether Friday’s salad gets eaten or thrown out.

Set that order while you write the plan, because on the night itself you will cook whatever you feel like. And a small midweek run for the fresh things is easier than asking a bag of greens to last.

Step 8: Keep One Flexible Night and One Pantry Meal

Two small pieces of insurance turn this from a plan into a routine.

The flexible night is the night with nothing written on it. You already set one aside when you counted the dinners you needed, so keep it empty. It is where the late meeting goes, or the evening nobody has the energy. A plan with slack in it bends. A plan with no slack snaps on the first Tuesday.

The pantry meal is the dinner you can cook out of what is always in the house: pasta with canned tomatoes, garlic and whatever cheese is around, or rice with a can of beans, an onion and some spices. The one rule is that its ingredients never come off the shopping list, even in the weeks you do not cook it, so they are always there.

When a night goes wrong, and one will, you have two answers ready and the week holds. Eating well is still down to what you cook. What the plan does is stop one bad Tuesday from taking the rest of the week with it.

The Ten Minute Version

Once you have done it twice, the whole routine fits on the back of an envelope.

• Cross out the nights you will not cook. Work, plans, takeout, somebody away.
• Count what is left and take two off. One for leftovers, one for a night off.
• Pick that many dinners, shortest cooking time first. Match the dinner to the night.
• Take most of them from your rotation. One new recipe a week is plenty.
• List the ingredients, merge the repeats, group by aisle. Note which dinner each line is for.
• Check the fridge and the cupboard, then go. Cross off what you already own.
• Cook the delicate things first. Cans and root vegetables can wait.
• Leave one night open and keep a pantry meal ready. Something will go wrong on one of them.

The first time takes longer, because you are writing the rotation as well. After that it is ten minutes and one sheet of paper.

What to Change When It Stops Working

It will stop working, usually around the third week, and usually because the plan grew. Week one you plan four dinners. Week two goes well, so you plan six. Week three you plan six again, two of them new recipes, on a week with a late meeting in it. Then it falls over and it feels like you failed, when what happened is that the plan got bigger than the week.

When that happens, cut three things in this order.

• Cut the number of dinners. Go back to three. Three planned dinners and four improvised nights still beats seven improvised nights, and it is a week you can finish.
• Cut the new recipes. Go to zero for two weeks and cook only what you already know. The plan exists to stop the six o’clock question, and it can do that while your cooking stands still.
• Cut the number of trips. One store, one list. A plan that needs a second trip on Wednesday works only in a good week.

If it still is not working after those three cuts, look at the week rather than the routine. Where nobody is home before eight, what helps is different dinners: things that reheat, and things somebody else in the house can start before you get in.

Where an App Helps, and Where It Does Not

Everything above works on paper. The tedious part is the arithmetic: going through three to five dinners, adding up the ingredients that repeat, and rewriting the whole thing in the order of the store. It takes a few minutes and it is easy to get wrong when you are tired.

That is the part we built Simmerset for. You pick three to seven dinners and it writes one grocery list, grouped by aisle, with quantities added up across dinners wherever the units allow it. Every line says which dinner it came from, so when Thursday falls through you can see what to leave on the shelf. There is no retailer account and no store to choose, so you shop the list wherever you want. The free version has no time limit, and Plus is USD 4.99 a month or USD 39.99 a year, tax included. It is built by the Spoonacular team. If you want to see how other planners handle the list, we compared several.

Deciding is still yours. Which dinners fit your week, who will refuse what, whether Wednesday is hopeless at all: software has no view on any of that. It takes the arithmetic off you and leaves the rest. A sheet of paper does the same arithmetic a little slower, and there is nothing wrong with keeping the pen.