Recently, I wanted a white board to have a physical list of homemade healthy food available at home. We didn’t have the money for one so we bought some dry-erase markers and taped old paper bags onto the back of the glass of our rarely used china cabinet. I like having a big visible list in the kitchen so my husband and I could refrain from opening the fridge several times a day. I also like planning a day before or on the day of so I can gouge what we’re craving for and which ingredients we have available that day.
Forgive the handwriting but I listed down several foods and recipes that we enjoy and have been repeats in our diet. We also wanted it to be relatively cheap so we process and prep meals at home to save food. All of the meals and food items listed are vegan. So far, we’ve been saving up great and feeling better with relatively healthier eating :D
How do you plan your meals?
image description: A china cabinet with its glass doors used like a white board. Brown paper bags are taped behind the glass to make the text visible.
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This is awesome. I like the lists. What recipes are your mainstays, and where can I find them
I use the app Paprika – it works on every platform. Lets me meal plan and make a grocery list for each recipe. Been clipping recipes in it for 10+ years. https://www.paprikaapp.com/
I love how paprika will extract the ingredients and cooking instructions from a recipe site so I don’t have to hunt through a page that’s a mile long!
My girlfriend and I have a recipe box that we write out recipe cards for any meals we like enough to want to make more in the future. On the weekends, we decide which ones we want for the week and do the grocery shopping accordingly for the week. Every week also consists of some amount of food prep for lunches to take into work so that can be in the fridge so we can be ahead of the game a little bit at least.
I use an online service called CopyMeThat (not linking because I’m not shilling, you can look it up yourself). It lets me save online recipes and make a meal plan with them (and also a shopping list, but I generally do that by hand because I know what I have in stock already). I have more than 400 recipes saved and we’ve tried more than 300 of them, from cuisines all over the world.
My gf and I got a little magnetic whiteboard with each day of the week on it. We split the work up a bit. On Sundays I plan out the week’s meals, and check if we have all the ingredients for them. I’ll write it out on the white board, and put a star next to an entry if we need to get something from the store for it.
We both use the app paprika to manage our grocery list and recipes.
She will do the shopping usually, and then I am the cook throughout the week.
We both used to be way more chill about things and ate a lot of frozen food but changed a lot when covid started
I checked out the app but I saw it was paid (we don’t even have money for that lol). All of our recipes are written down on paper so that we can put it on a mounted clip and read it quick. I should probably look into digitizing our grocery and recipe lists.
How did things change during covid?
Yeah it was paid. Unfortunately it was a while ago so I can’t quite remember how it was set up, but I believe it’s only a single $5 purchase, no recurring fees. And we just made one account and have it logged in on each of our devices. So in total I think it was just $5
Covid for us just meant more time at home to try new things mostly. It was also partially spurred on by a doctor’s visit for me where I had slightly high cholesterol and was told to cut back on frozen foods. So the combination of the two got us into cooking more and it cleared all that up thankfully
I cook on summer camp, our meal plan is same as last year but changed for trips outside off camp site.
It is only a reference, on site we cook from what we can get hands on or what didn’t lasts long.
For how many people do you cook for and what meals do you usually prepare in camp?
For about 50 people 3 meals per day.
There isn’t oven, and we mostly cook on wood stove in 50l pots. So we are little bit limited in what we can cook. It is usually pasta, potatoes, rice, bulgur, couscous and sauces.
But favourite meal is some India with flatbread (translated don’t know if it makes sense). You wouldn’t believe how quickly it disappears.
My wife and I hate having our entire weeks meals planned out. We love to be a little spontaneous so we have generally do less meal prep. We typically cook daily and gives us a change to make what we feel like each day.
We have a few standards that we always have ingredients for which we generally make. For these we just make them whenever we feel like it. We have a few staples that we can make using multiple different sets of vegetables like stir fry and pasta that we whip up with whatever we have around. For other recipes we just go to the store to get things just for that meal. We really try to avoid having too much in our fridge since it goes bad quickly with just two of us. Its more about general techniques or vague recipes.
I’m a single university student with a small budget (maybe $60 per week). When I do meal plan I try to make a dinner that will last me a few days but it’s not always easy. For one, it gets boring, and two, some days I’m just hungrier than others so there are weeks where I go past my budget.
I’d be curious to hear how other university students do it.
If you’re not very fond of repeating meals, you can try experimenting on new recipes that depend on the same base ingredients and vary on its toppings and flavorings. I remember I’d always have rice as a base and add different veggies and seasonings like soy sauce and chili flakes to make a quick fried rice. It takes time to develop your home cooking mainstays but if you do have some spare time, you can try figuring it out.
For me, I feel like when I am meal prepping on the weekends I always have the best of intentions. In my head I’m thinking these meals all sound healthy and great. Then it gets into the middle of the week and stress happens and you don’t care what you made, you want carbs. When you are meal planning it really helps to think about what you’ve got going on that week and what you like to eat in different moods. I will try to explain what I mean by that.
Consider what types of cuisine you like (italian, indian, chinese, mexican, etc) and when you typically want that cuisine (could eat it every day, only when I’m having a bad day, once a week, as a celebration, etc). Write that down on a piece of paper.
Next, what does your week ahead look like? Is it just an average week? Do you have exams and are going to be stressed? Once you know that you can add up the number of meals you will need based on the categories you wrote down for “when you typically want that cuisine.” To give yourself some grace, always try to plan for at least 1 “had a bad day” meal.
That will in turn give you an idea of what types of things to cook, and you can google recipes based on that. It helps if you pick recipes that use similar ingredients, as you only have to prep that thing once.
From a prep perspective, look at the recipes that you selected and see what commonalities they have. You can prepare those common ingredients ahead of time. For example, lots of recipes I make use rice so I can make a bunch of rice at the beginning of the week and then have it for multiple meals. I’ve also found it helps to prepare sauces for recipes and put them in mason jars in the fridge. Trying to follow a list of ingredients for a sauce when you only have 5 minutes always just leaves me frustrated.
The end result is that you won’t have a full meal prepared ahead of time but you’ll have as much done as possible beforehand. Definitely saves time if you can start on say step 5 of a recipe instead of step 1.
I wrote my own app that I use to enter all my recipes. In the app, I then select which meals to prepare for any given day of the week, along with number of servings I need to prepare for my wife, kids and myself. The app lets me create a shopping list from the selected meals with the correct amounts that I need to buy. I then take this shopping list (copied to the Notes App) to the grocery store and buy everything I need. The app even lets me store preparation instructions, so I use it again while cooking. If you want to try it out yourself: it’s available on the Google Play Store: Shop&Cook
That’s really cool! I unfortunately have iOS devices but I’ve been trying to figure out automation via Notion instead
