Meal planning in ten minutes a week
3 min read
Meal planning has a reputation for being a weekend project. It isn't, as long as you stop trying to plan every meal and stop trying to cook something new every night.
Plan dinners, ignore the rest
Breakfast and lunch are habits, not decisions. Dinner is the meal that derails into takeaway at 6pm. Plan that one and you've solved most of the problem.
Fifteen recipes is plenty
A rotation of fifteen dinners you already know how to cook will cover a month without repeating on consecutive weeks. Write them down once — ingredients included — and the grocery list stops being a weekly act of memory.
Decide the rules, not the meals
The real decision is structural: which nights need cooking, and any constraints that apply — vegetarian on Mondays, nothing fussy on the nights everyone gets home late. Set those once and the specific meals can be picked for you.