What do you do if you don't meal plan?

[SingularityCat]

For some reason I always thought when people talked about "meal planning" they meant partially pre-preparing meals during the weekend for the week ahead, not just planning in advance what you're going to eat that week and shopping accordingly.

I don't understand how you can do any differently than this? So those of you who don't meal plan, what do you do? Do you just go to the shops really regularly? Or buy staples and then make stuff using that? I'm intrigued!

A veg box plus a Sunday roast with leftovers made into two meals in the week. Some batch cooking for the freezer too. Everything else I just wing it on the day.

Typically I look in the fridge, then the freezer, then the cupboard, then the fridge again. Then I say to DH "I have no idea what to cook." And he says "for fuck sake Dougal, didn't you do any meal planning or follow the list when you went shopping?" And I'll remind him I went to Aldi and got overwhelmed by the centre aisle of doom so came away with a pack of chicken goujons, some potatoes, that gorgeous Moser Roth chocolate, a tent, a telescope, a cute cat bed and a candle.

Only those Who literally go shopping every night and buy stuff for that night can claim that they don't meal plan

You seem to be taking it all very personally.

I've never sat down and meal planned a thing in my life. I buy a bunch of stuff I fancy. Sometimes I cook it but mostly it ends up shoved in the freezer for months on end and I cook it randomly when there's nothing else in and I CBA to go to the supermarket.

I don't have kids and DH and I generally eat separately so I only buy and cook what I fancy everyday. I've got snacks and tins that have been sat in the cupboards for almost a year and they've not been eaten.

In the middle of a thread about so many thought out meals, this made me laugh a lot!

I'm generally pretty organised, but just can't think more than a couple of days in advance about meals. Thinking of three meals per day every day over covid was awful! Think it's because food and meal times was a chaotic affair when i was young. DC gets balanced meals, by myself i eat random crap at random times. Little waste though as I shop small and frequent.

I've never sat down and meal planned a thing in my life. I buy a bunch of stuff I fancy.

If I didn't have a hoard of absolute locust kids I'd do this. I wouldn't plan.

I buy random stuff once a week then play Ready Steady Cook with what we have: pick a protein, a carb and two or three veg and mix it up. Freezer helps it not be quite as random as it sounds…

Yeah, I think having kids (especially young kids) means meal planning makes quite a bit of sense.

We have cupboard, fridge and freezer full of things we'll eat. I finish work at 5 and then decide what to cook.
Occasionally I will decide earlier in the day but that's not often.

I meal plan in that I never have pasta or pizza before a karate class (makes me feel queasy).

And I do have an idea, roughly, of what we're going to eat tomorrow. Mostly. Not today though. I have no clue what we're having tomorrow. Or Friday, for that matter. I'll see what I feel like cooking/having.

Every now and then I tell myself I should meal plan for the week- and then I remember that there's no way if I can tell on a Monday what I might fancy eating on a Friday.

Today, for instance, I ate an entire apple pie for breakfast and lunch. I had no idea I fancied it, until I saw it in the reduced section in Sainsbury's.

Ha, I'm in the exact same position but since I also happen to have half a jar of jerk paste in the fringe (and had never considered putting them together) you have inspired me to make jerk cauliflower wraps!

I think that this is quite tied to the slightly skewed position food has in our lives.

I both love food, but get furiously annoyed at least once a week that I'm hungry AGAIN, and have to stop whatever I'm doing, prepare and eat some food, that I had to buy, and that has to have a finely tuned bunch of ingredients or else I'll die or look ugly or something.

Drinking isn't like that. You drink water, and if you drink too much it drains out. WHY can't calories be that way?!?!

... Hence why I don't meal plan. I just horde a massive pile of foods Iike and ingredients that can't be turned into food. I refuse to make the process more complicated than a hunter gatherer.

Same

We don’t meal plan really. I order the staples on the online shop so things that we know we regularly go through are delivered (butter, loo roll, crisps, toothpaste, shower gel, washing stuff, fruit and veg, that sort of stuff) - it comes on a Friday morning. then dh goes to the butchers on a Saturday and gets what looks nice for the weekend. And then during the week he does most of the cooking so it’s down to him. He goes to the supermarket most days and cooks what he or we fancy.
i don’t care, he cooks, I eat. I’d happily put more stuff on the online shop but we eat a lot of meat and don’t like supermarket meat as much as butcher’s meat. Thursday night (before the food shopping comes) we tend to have a fridge forage and use up any leftovers or things that haven’t been cooked.
works for us.

I meal plan. It keeps shopping costs down and helps me organise the family. I don't think I could cope with not having an idea of what we're eating that day. I've got too many other things going on!

I always wonder this! I'm not that meticulous but I will always make a list of 4-5 dinners for the next week and check what we already have, and what I need to buy.

Lots of staples, and a big freezer.

I've tried meal planning, I did manage it at one point. But I lost interest / didn't have the time to do it consistently. I've got a thread on here about it - turns out it's difficult to do a weekly meal plan when every day is different, and each week is different (in terms of who's around, who's home when etc - neither DH nor I have regular working hours, and our boys are in and out of school / activities / social stuff). And it's really hard if you don't do a weekly big shop that ties in with the meal planning day.

So now I do a big shop fortnightly-ish, freeze all the meat / chicken / fish / frozen veg etc and shop 2-3 times a week for fresh fruit / veg / salad / bread. I commute by bike, and I can fit 2-3 days of fruit and veg in my panniers if I stop off on the way home from work. I keep plenty of basics - pasta, rice, couscous, etc plus tinned tomatoes, herbs and spices. AS long as there's protein in the freezer, staples in the cupboard, and enough veg / salad to accompany it, I can come up with a good, healthy, home-cooked meal every night without too much stress.

The downsides is food waste, we do throw more out than when I was meal planning. But I'm getting better at catching the veg and turning it into soup!

Eat the same dinner Saturday (homemade pizza night), Sunday (a roast), the leftovers on a Monday, Tuesday is baked potato night. DH and DS go to MIL for dinner on a Thursday. So I really only have to think what to have Wednesdays and Fridays. Usually use my freezer stash for one of those nights. Then the other i cook something like veggie curry/chilli/bolognese a salmon traybake, sausages, burritos type dinner. A bit boring having the same dinner 4 nights every week. But at least we can have variety 2 nights

If you meal plan strictly surely you miss out on any bargains? I happened to be in a brand new supermarket in Tuesday ... they had clearly over estimated demand so I got the most amazing reductions- less than 20% of original cost. So for example this evening I had a £7.50 pizza reduced to £1.49! Such a bargain. And plenty left over!

I do a weekly shop online with the basics, fresh stuff, general supplies household stuff and snack items.
dh goes to the butchers at the weekend and gets whatever meat looks good.
he does the cooking.
most days he pops to the supermarket (which is on his way home) to pick up the bits to go with whatever he fancies cooking that night.
Just the way we do it.
Very little wasted (we have chickens who eat a lot of scraps and if I’m wfh I will eat the leftovers if there are any).