Part 2: Discover Your Meal-Planning Style

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This post is part of a series to help you cook more in the new year. You can click the green button to follow along with weekly emails:

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Waaaay back when I was a teenager, I would get so annoyed with my mom.

“What should we do for dinner?” she would ask, at about ten o’clock in the morning. Seriously?

Even though my mom was mainly cooking from cans and boxes, a lifetime of experience had trained her well.

WE should all be more like our moms

"I have no idea what I’m going to be in the mood for by dinnertime,” I would whine. And it’s true. A lot of things can happen between 10am and dinnertime. Who knows what the day will bring?

But if you’re the cook, here’s what you do know: you will be making that meal. They will need to eat, and it will be up to you to feed them. Who knows what else the day will bring? Exactly. So best to plan ahead.

How Non-Cooks View Meal Planning

People who aren’t in the habit of cooking for themselves (including the me of yesteryear) tend to view meal planning like this:

As dinnertime approaches, they notice they’re getting hungry. They search their feelings, and choices get made in real time. What am I hungry for? What sounds good to me right now? The next move might be standing with the refrigerator door open, calculating how long it would take to heat various options in the microwave. Or idling at the drive-through window, waiting for the choice du jour to be deposited into their lap.

I speak from experience.

How Cooks View Meal Planning

People who cook for themselves tend to view things differently. For them, it might look something more like this:

For cooks, the mood at dinnertime is not driving the decision-making. Decisions have already been made. Ideas were hatched, feelings were felt, refrigerator doors were opened - hours ago. (Or maybe even days ago!) A plan is already in place. That plan might have started with a mood (It’s raining, let’s have something warm and cozy! It’s hot, let’s have something light and cool! It’s a birthday, let’s have something special! It’s a busy day, let’s have something simple!). But the mood didn’t just show up from nowhere at dinnertime.

For cooks, meal planning is more of a conversation between the moods and the foods. You have an idea, you think about what you have on hand, you think about what you’re in the mood for, you make a plan. But by mealtime, the plan is steering things. And you, my cooking friend, are in the driver’s seat.

And The Plan Will Help Shape the Moods

Once you starting cooking with a plan, a funny thing happens. Instead of showing up from nowhere, moods at dinnertime now come from somewhere. And one of the places they come from is… your plan!

An illustration:

It’s cold and rainy, so you think to yourself (eg the night before or in the morning) let’s have something cozy and warm for dinner.

You either take a quick peek or consult your memory banks and realize you have chicken thighs in the freezer and noodles in the pantry. You come up with an idea: a nice, hearty chicken noodle soup would be perfect.

You put the chicken thighs in the fridge to defrost, and decide on a recipe. You text your family: chicken soup for dinner tonight!

On your way home from work (or during lunch) you make a 15 minute stop at the grocery store for parsley and celery. All day, you’re thinking about how wonderful that homemade chicken soup is going to be.

When you get home, you pull it together and put it on the table.

And it just so happens, by dinnertime everyone was in the mood for chicken soup!

But I like being spontaneous!

So do I! And I’ve resisted a llloooooot of things in life that have required planning. Including cooking routinely!

Before I had children I was more of a hobby cook, and I would spend random weekends on some crazy cooking project. No one was relying on me to actually be fed. Come dinnertime on a Tuesday evening, I was not going to be the one reliably putting food on the table.

But I eventually realized that if people are going to eat at a given time, and I want my cooking to be what feeds them, the only way for that to happen is with a plan.

So if this is your goal, then you’re going to have to do some planning. But the good news is that, the more you do it, the more confidence and experience you build, and the more you’re able to start improvising. Once you really learn the ropes, you might even get to the point where you can stand with the refrigerator door open and spontaneously figure out how to put things together to make something you’ve never made before! But to get to that point, you need a lot of experience. So for now, start with a plan.

Okay, so how do I plan?

Depending on your personality and your work schedule, you have some options:

The Weekly Approach (less spontaneous)

I have a friend who decides each weekend what her family will be eating for dinner every night that week. She prints out recipes, makes a grocery list, does the shopping, and maybe a little prep. Then, all the decisions have been made. Each evening, depending on their schedules, either she or her husband can just pick up that night’s recipe and start cooking. Occasionally she’ll even leave a foil-covered casserole in the fridge with a post-it saying “put this in the oven at 350 at 5pm.” Dinner will always be on the table, on time. And it will be exactly what was planned.

If you are the type of person who likes everything laid out in advance, you can do this too!

Your schedule could be something like:

Saturday: Look through recipes and lay out the menu for the week

Sunday: Clean out your fridge. Shop for ingredients. Wash, dry and prep veggies for each dish. Store the prepped ingredients in labeled containers in the fridge.

Each weekday morning: Double-check that evening’s recipe; assemble or prep through the beginning recipe steps as much as possible. Leave the recipes and/or to-dos out for yourself/your partner.

Each weekday evening: When it’s time to make dinner, just pick up the recipe or to-do list and follow instructions. Dinner is served!

The benefits of this approach are temendous. If you have particular dietary goals or restrictions, you’ll can calculate everything in advance. If you’re trying to stick to a budget, you can be sure to plan meals that will stay within it. If you get stuck in traffic, whoever gets home first can still get dinner on the table. Dinner will reliably be served at a particular time, so everyone can plan to gather at the table, hopefully hungry. You can involve kids and/or your partner in the prep and/or in the final finishing, so everyone is on board.

If you’re a new cook, or a person who only cooks from recipes, or a person who is serious about daily cooking but very pressed for time, this weekly approach is probably the best for you.

The Daily/Quasi-Weekly Approach (more spontaneous)

I’ve always aspired to plan ahead on a weekly basis, like my friend. I’m sure I would save money, and dinner would always be served on time. But somehow I’ve never quite been able to make it happen. Either the weekend gets hijacked with other activities, or something crops up mid-week that I didn’t expect. Or honestly, I just want to change things up halfway through. (Remember what I said about being spontaneous?) I used to feel bad about this, worrying it signalled a lack of discipline in myself. But over time I’ve grown to understand that’s just who I am. I’m a seat-of-the-pants type of gal. I’m an improviser.

I still plan, but it’s more of a plan-as-you-go approach, which allows for deviations and flexibility through the week if the need (or lack of discipline) arises.

If this sounds more like you, a schedule could be something like:

Saturday/Sunday: Look through recipes and your pantry/fridge. Make a list of staples you’re running low on. With your list in hand, and rough recipe ideas swimming through your imagination, go shopping. Buy what’s on your list, as well as what looks interesting/appetizing/seasonal while you’re there. Google while shopping as needed to firm up ideas. Bring everything home and put it away. Decide on Monday’s meal and prep whatever is needed. Also, sketch out ideas for the rest of the week.

Monday morning: Double check Monday’s recipe and confirm everything is ready to go. Assemble or prep through the beginning recipe steps as needed. Leave the recipe and/or to-dos out for yourself/your partner. If time permits, sneak a peak at your list of ideas for the rest of the week so you can be thinking of them off and on through the day.

Monday evening: Pick up the recipe or to-do list, and follow instructions. Dinner is served! During dinner or afterwards, decide on final plans for Tuesday. After dinner, be sure ingredients are ready/prepped for the next day as needed.

Tuesday through Friday: Strive to finalize each evening’s dinner menu by the previous evening. Grab any last-minute items at the store during lunch or on your way home (or send your partner). Rinse and repeat!

If you’re a more experienced cook, or a person who can cook without recipes, or a person with a bit more scheduling flexibility, or a person who likes the challenge of learning to cook with random new ingredients you find at the farmers market, this daily/quasi-weekly approach might be better for you.

Label Everything

Whatever approach you use, label everything in your fridge or freezer with the name of what’s in the container and the date it was made/prepped. This doesn’t have to be Instagram-worthy beautiful, it’s just functional. Use masking tape and a sharpie (that’s what the pros use!) and label everything. Containers without labels tend to look untrustworthy, and end up getting tossed before they’re used.

PS: Leftovers are Always your best friend

A friend once told me that her son-in-law, who she said loved to cook, refused to eat leftovers. I was completely dumbfounded. How does that even work?

If you are cooking regularly, habitually, then you are all about the leftovers. I’ll talk more about this in a future post, but for now, as you’re planning your meals for the week, think about how you can use the leftovers in another meal afterwards. For example, if I’m roasting chicken thighs, I’m going to roast more than I need for dinner tonight so I can shred the rest of the meat and use it in tacos on another night. Or if I’m making soup, I’m definitely making about double the amount we’ll eat at a single meal. I can either freeze the rest for the future, or keep it in the fridge for someone’s lunch or an easy microwave dinner on another night.

In my cooking, tonight’s dinner is rarely served in totality on another day the same week (though it might be someone’s lunch). But the piece-parts of tonight’s dinner will defnitely be used in other meals. And in fact, I plan ahead to make sure that’s the case.

(And again - label everything!)

Some recipes for your journey…

Here’s a collection of recipes that’s all about cooking more in the new year. I know I’ve used a lot of dinner examples in this post, but breakfast can be a great place to start cooking more, and especially to exercise your planning-ahead muscles.

This collection includes a lot ot things you can make in bigger batches over the weekend, then heat and eat through the week. Enjoy!

More Recipe Inspo for Cooking More

Each of these collections includes more recipes you can use to plan your meals.

Follow this series: Let’s Cook More in the New Year!

This post is part of a series with a month’s worth of content to help you cook more. I’ll be sharing new posts each week with recipes, ideas and tips to help you cook more in the new year. If you want to get emails with new content each week, you can click this button to follow along!

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Next week: Batch Cooking and Other Strategies

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