Do you meal plan?

My wife and I have been planning 2-3 dinners per week and we double the recipe for them so we can just heat up leftovers for dinner or lunches the next day. It's been a good compromise between the 'make everything on Sunday' style prepping and making something new every night. We still have flexibility in what we each each day, but we also only need to cook half as often.

We try (keyword try, doesn't always work out) to pick recipes with overlapping ingredients so there's asittle waste as possible.

Google shopping list is what we use to keep track of things since it has Google Home / Google Assistant integration and can connect to both of our accounts so everything is in-sync.

I don't think what I do is really meal planning, but here are my usual steps:

1. Build a list of what recipes you know, and any new ones that you'd like to try. You can further categorize them based on your own preferences (easy/hard, have most spices/need to buy lots)

2. From this list, decide if you've got a craving for anything specific, haven't eaten one in a long time and want to try it again, or want to try one of the new recipes. This narrows down to what you will likely plan to eat this week. Sometimes my cravings include fast food so that goes on my plan.

3. Look at your schedule for the coming week, do you have any after-work activities coming up (like gym or appointments)? These days you will likely be home late, so dinner will either be eaten out (fast food) or a quick recipe (maybe pasta or other types of Asian noodles). On the remaining days that you have time to cook, stick in recipes from your list in whichever order you like.

4. Now it's time to take stock of what you have at home (fridge, cans, dried food, spices), and what else you need to get to meet your 'plan' this week. Anything that's missing will become your grocery list. If any recipe lacks too many ingredients or seems not worth the effort at this point, swap it out for when you've got more motivation.

5. Shopping time is my favourite. You can buy exactly what you need, or meats can be bought in larger quantities and frozen for subsequent weeks. Sometimes you see something really fresh or nice that you just have to get, try to avoid this until you are comfortable enough in your routine to throw in changes.

That's about it, after that it's just taking one day at a time. Plans may change and you may have an extra appointment, then just decide if you skip that day's recipe or push everything back by one. I don't really write it down, it's mostly in my head or just a quick record in notepad.

I try to grocery shop once a week and pickup whatever looks good or fresh that I can use in a variety of meals throughout the week. My goal is to buy a small amount of higher quality things that I can use in 2-3 meals.

Lately though I’ve just been going to the store when I want to make something and it’s much more stressful that way. I need to get back into doing more planning.

I would like to do more actual meal planning lol. Currently I am ordering 3 meals weekly from HelloFresh or HomeChef and making those meals as I or my partner want them. I plan to eat out a few times a week as well. The rest of the time it’s dependent on my schedule and my energy levels, so I pretty much just keep a very rough outline in my head.

I want to use my kitchen whiteboard more so I might start keeping my rough schedule on there. I don’t really like apps because ultimately I want to cut down on my screen time, but I’m sure there are some really useful ones out there.

Weekly. Meals based on what is on sale. Friday is always pizza night. Homemade or takeout.

Every Wednesday. That's when sales flyers come out for Aldi (website) and Food Lion (app). I make a list of all the produce going on sale. I keep a spreadsheet full of recipes organized by produce ingredient, and pick out recipes for the week based on sales and anything in my freezer that needs using.

I also have certain weekly rules. I plan 4 dinners and 3 breakfasts. In all these meals, only 2 can have meat, at least 2 must use legumes, at least one must have spinach, and at least one must have fatty fish (tuna or salmon, doesn't count as meat). I aim for an anti-inflammatory diet, so I try to include that type of ingredient in each meal. It's challenging, but fun to plan and has greatly increased my family's nutrition.

I use Evernote on my phone to plan meals. I keep a list there of all foods in my freezer (meats, produce, breads, whole meals) and the date they were put in. Excel on my laptop to store and organize recipes. And the Anytime app to keep grocery lists for all the stores I visit.

I just started doing it out of inspiration from my coworker. I'm lazy and hate spending a lot of time cooking, and cleaning

So here's what I do

• instant white rice, season with basically any "flavor God" seasoning, salt and pepper if needed, THEN microwave it
• grab aldis green bag chicken (the parmesan Breaded tenders?), throw in their air fryer for 400 for like 14 mins (still adjusting)
• grab containers from Amazon
• put rice in, cut chicken as desired
• throw in freezee

A lot of this you can combine tasks and save time :)

We go back and forth. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. It seems like the busier we are, the more we actually meal plan. I'm curious too what peoples' strategies are, and what works well.

I don't, I really wish I did more, but I've found it a difficult habit to develop and keep up with for some reason, although I have tried several times.

One of the most successful methods I've had was with my sous vide cooker. I would go to Costco (/Sam's Club/BJ's/whatever bulk goods store) and buy a variety of meat, couple packs of steaks, pork chops, chicken, etc. Once home I would season and portion the meat out into individual servings, then vacuum seal and freeze. Before work every morning I'd throw a frozen protein in the water bath and go to work, which was only 5 minutes away from home, at lunch time I'd clock out, rush home, quickly sear my whatever was cooking and add a can of vegetables or some other leftover for a side. Was a phenomenal system, but only lasted a few months before the job ended, and just haven't tried to pick up the habit again.

At one point I set up Mealie, a self-hosted recipe tracker/scraper that worked well and helped to generate some grocery lists. That was nice because I was able to select different things I wanted to make over the course of a week and have it generate a list of what I need ingredient wise.

However I never really "stuck with it" as a habit. Mealie is really cool in that it can (theoretically) scrape recipes out of other websites, so it centralizes your recipes and strips the "blog" fluff out of them. But in practice it wasn't great at doing that, it relied on very specific metadata tags that just aren't present/formatted properly in a lot of recipe blogs, so it wound up being more trouble to use than it's worth. If I were more dedicated I might be willing to manually transcribe the recipes, but I ain't lol.

Anyways, apologies, I realize that's kinda ranty and doesn't really answer your question. I'm posting partially cause I hope other people will share their meal-prep-planning and I can steal ideas haha.

I need some inspiration I usually do meal planning once a week. My partner took over cooking for the last week and I am now super off my game.

Not really, I can't tell what I'd like to eat more than 2-3 days forward. I won't eat what I don't want to so it's not that easy