For about three years I made a weekly meal plan. Seven days, a meal against each, worked out on a Sunday with the calendar open.
Every single week it survived until Tuesday.
Not because the meals were wrong. Because Tuesday would turn out to have football in it, or somebody would be at my mum’s, or I’d get in at six with a headache and the plan would say fish pie, and then I’d cook something else and feel, faintly, like I had failed at a small administrative task. Which, over three years, is quite a lot of small failures for something that is meant to make life easier.
Plan the meals, not the days
The card inside the cupboard door has six things on it. That’s it. Six dinners we can all eat and that I can make without looking anything up.
We shop for all six. Which one happens on which night gets decided at about five o’clock, based on who is in, what got eaten at lunch, and how the afternoon went. Nothing is assigned. Nothing can therefore be deviated from.
This is such a small change from what I was doing before and it has been the difference between a system that works and a system that generates guilt.
Choosing the six
It took longer than I expected, because the honest answer is not the flattering one.
The six are: the lentil soup, a traybake with sausages, pasta with a tomato sauce, jacket potatoes, a stir fry, and fish fingers with things. That’s the actual list. It is not going to impress anyone and two of them are barely cooking.
The test I used was: have we made this more than five times, and did anybody complain. That’s it. Several genuinely nicer meals didn’t make it, and one that I love — a proper ragu — didn’t make it because it takes three hours, and a meal that takes three hours is a weekend, not a Tuesday.
Two of the six need nothing fresh at all. Those are the ones that get made on the Thursday when the fridge has turned into a lemon and some yoghurts.
Where it lives
Inside a cupboard door, at eye level, on a bit of card.
The two previous versions lived in a notebook and in an app. Which is to say they lived nowhere at all. A plan you have to go and find gets found on the days when everything is going well, and the days when everything is going well were never the problem.
The month of batch cooking
One Sunday, in a burst of resolve, I made fourteen portions of four different things. It took the entire day. Tom took the children out. I was extremely pleased with myself at about four o’clock.
We ate four of them.
By Wednesday nobody wanted what Sunday had decided, and the freezer filled up with the rest, and a portion of chilli from that day was thrown away in the March. What does work is doubling a thing you’re already making — the soup, the traybake — which costs no extra time and no extra decisions, and gets eaten because it’s there on the day you didn’t want to cook, rather than being a commitment made a fortnight ago by a more optimistic person.
Twice a year
The card gets rewritten when I notice something hasn’t been made for two months. Meals fall off quietly and it’s worth catching, because a list with a dead meal on it is a list you start ignoring.
This is the third card. The first two were laminated. I think about that a lot.
Things people email to ask
- How do you meal plan for a family without it falling apart?
- Plan the meals, not the days. We keep a list of six dinners we can make without thinking, stuck inside a cupboard door, and shop for all six — which one happens on which night is decided at about five o’clock based on who is in and how the day has gone. Assigning meals to specific days is what broke every plan we tried before.
- How many meals should be on a family rotation?
- Six is our number and it took some finding. Fewer than five and people notice the repetition; more than eight and the shopping stops being predictable and the list stops being memorable. The six covers a week with one takeaway or leftovers night, and it is rewritten about twice a year when something quietly stops being cooked.
- Where should you keep a meal plan?
- Where the cooking happens. Ours is a bit of card taped inside a cupboard door at eye level, and the two versions before it lived in a notebook and in an app respectively, which is to say they lived nowhere. A plan you have to go and find is a plan that gets found on the good days, and the good days were never the problem.
- Is batch cooking worth it for a family?
- Not the way we did it. One heroic Sunday producing fourteen portions cost us the whole day and we ate four of them, because by Wednesday nobody wanted what Sunday had decided. Doubling one thing that is already being cooked works far better — the soup, the traybake — and costs nothing extra in time or willpower.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
The lentil soup we’ve made forty times
It is not a good recipe. It is a repeatable one — four things we always have, one pan, and a texture that survives being reheated on a Tuesday by a man who is not paying attention.
The traybake that covers three dinners
One tray, one oven, forty minutes, and no attention required in the middle of it. It is the only thing I cook that produces a second and third meal without me having decided to make a second and third meal.
He eats four things
Rowan is three and eats pasta, toast, yoghurt and apples. We spent a year trying to fix this and made it worse, and then we stopped trying to fix it and it started, very slowly, moving.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
Write to us