To struggle with meal planning this much?

[Freecuthbert]

I'm a good cook and enjoy it, but I find meal planning hard work, can't really get my head around it. I have to research recipes and work out the right amount of ingredients for our household, write a list of what we need. But once I go through all that, pick what we want that week etc, it all ends up as odd bits of this and that ingredient and just not feasible at all. The food shop would cost me a bloody fortune! So then I have to try and whittle it down and plan the meals strategically so they share ingredients etc so things don't go to waste and I'm not overspending. It takes me hours tbh... I feel like I'm doing it all wrong.

I can't even look in my cupboard at bits and think up of meals out of that. I'm rubbish at remembering recipes as well! I have to look everything up, it's a nightmare. We're not the kind of family who could eat the same meals week in week out. If we ate the same thing every week I'd go right off it. We have some tried and tested favourites but they're more monthly than weekly if anything... wouldn't be favourites anymore if had more often than that tbh. And we love trying new things often.

I'm using gousto at the moment for 4 days a week because of this, so I only have 3 days a week to struggle with meal planning. But those 3 days now end up being a cop out. Mixture of fending for ourselves out of the freezer, takeaway, dinner at family's, quick stir fry, steak and chips, picky bits. We just have one child who is 12 months old, so it's easy to sort something out for her dinner when I'm not cooking properly... don't worry she doesn't have to cook a frozen pizza for herself or tuck into a medium rare steak!

Is it really meant to be this difficult? Or am I meant to just suck it up and have a set rota of meals that simplifies things (but loses a lot of joy for us), or spend hours on meticulous meal planning? Is there a secret app that basically plans all our meals and creates a shopping list? Honestly I don't mind cooking from fresh every night as long as the food is tasty and not monotonous.

Would love to shave some money off our food bill tbh, we are low income but not struggling and I'm frugal with lots of other things.

Op I went a bit minimalist and now don't follow recipes accurately because for simplicity I substitute with my own standard ingredients. So for example I no longer buy different oils I just use olive for everything. I only use cider vinegar even in "Asian" dishes.
I use a variation on the same basic veg, herbs and spices as a base in many meals. I ring the changes by buying different cuts of meats, fish, new pulses.
But I have to say no two meals the same, though there's a continuity there! I look at a few versions of the recipe online and pick what suits, I'm not a slave to them.
I do sometimes try a new recipe and "invest" in a new ingredient but if it's the sort of thing that I end up losing in the fridge (seaweed was one) then it it's out.

It's always great to eat out.😂

[quote Freecuthbert]@CouldIhaveaword
Yes I definitely rely on instructions and I hate straying from what a recipe says as I worry what if x ingredient is the key component that makes the dish and cutting it out ruins all the effort I put in. I'm like that a lot in life tbh, always want to follow instructions/plans and like the comfort of knowing what the right thing to do is. Sorry if that sounds ridiculous![/quote]
Yeah, I'm pretty much the opposite. Slapdash and lazy. No way I'd make a special trip for a missing ingredient. I'll substitute, cut corners and invent. But cooking is a creative process and over the years I've learned what works and what doesn't. Maybe cut loose from the recipes from time to time. Start simple with fewer ingredients, and have some fun.

Meal planning with new recipes is always going to be hugely time consuming. Also are you doing all the planning and cooking? DH and I cook half the week each, and he is involved in the planning too.

Week roughly goes
M - Either cook easy dish, often it's dh and salmon
T and W - I cook one chicken or other meat dish for two nights
Th - I try a new recipe
Fr - DH and anything often his amazing chill
Saturday and Sunday - DH uses up all the leftovers in various meals

I have a collection of around 30 recipes we like, and each week I just choose seven from it to cook. You need to create your own family recipe book with enough on it that you get variety, and then you can throw in a new one every so often.
I'd actually hate to be cooking new stuff all the time in case I didn't like it.

@Blackandwhitehorse

Oh I went through a stage like this! Always having leftovers but trying to do lots of exciting healthy food.

In the end I went for the max I could do of Gousto, got one of the roasting tin books and cooked from there and tried to put any leftovers in stir fries, quesadillas.

I now have around 15 meals I know we like and add in new ones to spice it up. Still left with random jars of tahini though. What can I use tahini in?!

About once every decade I buy a jar of tahini. I use it a few times( last time I got very enthusiastic about tahini salad dressing!) Then I find the jar 18 months later in the fridge. I'm due my next jar in 2025.

I used to use Gousto and also found it quite cheap really, but this year I am trying to keep it really simple so our new meal plan (once we’ve used up all the joints in the freezer)
M - soup and bread
T - jacket potatoes
W - Eggs
T - vegetable curry and naan or stir fry
F - fish fingers
S - pasta
S - veggie roast and cook the jackets for Tuesday.
I appreciate it looks boring but the kids will eat all that, it’s simple for me to shop/prepare and hopefully will be very cheap!

I hate meal planning too.

I think you should start recording what you eat each week and see if there's any patterns.

In our house over the course of a week I can guarantee that we'll have meals with salmon, pasta, curry and noodles. The recipes vary eg noodles will be chow mein one week and ramen the next but noodles is popular with my kids, cheap and veg heavy so I will plough on.

What are your favourite meals? You should add them to the plan since you're the cook.

I dislike meal planning too so have made it easier for myself. I have a folder of our favourite meals, divided into sections. Diff section for each day. Things that don’t comfortably fit into a category are put into the larger ‘free choice’ section. We are vegan so our meal plan looks like this:
Mon: pasta
Tues: free choice (many of these are a bit more involved/ time consuming meals, or we try new recipes as this is a quiet day re work)
Wed: (busy day and I am out in evening) we sort ourselves out. I will often have toast or a bagel when I come home)
Thur: stew/ soup/ Buddha bowl
Fri: mezze style platter full of diff breads, homemade cheeses, vegetables, salads etc. The veg will all be marinaded/ roast/ dressed etc so they are more Tapas style than ‘just veg’. Fresh ingredients served simply.
Sat: Fakeaway night. We make our own burgers, pizzas, loaded fries etc. Or if we are feeling lazy we will grab some oven chips and freezer food such as nuggets or sausages
Sun: pie/ nut roast/ lentil loaf served with all the trimmings and gravy.

I do use recipes but most of these are just things I know how to make and we have most ingredients, except veg, in our store cupboard at all times. Each category has a list of between 10-20 meals we have on regular rotation, so we can easily have a couple of months without repeating any of our regulars. In reality though we tend to have some we repeat more than others. I also batch cook when possible too eg make double and freeze one portion for another day. I can also easily look at what needs using up/ we have on and create a lovely healthy meal in minutes.
We do use recipes but it is more of an occasional thing. It would take me forever to meal plan the way you describe. Constantly relying on recipes sounds stressful. I do think cooking has a creative element to it, especially if you enjoy cooking. It sounds like you lack some confidence. I do think that part of being a good and confident cook is being able to be flexible or look at ingredients and work out what to cook with them. My DH is not a confident cook at all and is reliant on recipes. He also can’t look in the cupboard/ fridge and come up with meal ideas. In his case it is because he lacks confidence/ experience. He can just about cope if he has clear instructions to follow but he isn’t a good cook

Meal planning isn’t an exact science. Got two bell peppers and the recipe only requires one? Put both in - nothing bad will happen. It’s not a mathematical equation where everything has to add up perfectly over the week - you just have to be flexible around adding in more of what you have and leaving out the odd thing that won’t be missed.

Sounds like you need to both reduce the number of random ingredients, and find a way of using up the ones you do buy. Some ideas…

• Keep a list of random ingredients/leftovers and challenge yourself to add them to future meals.
• Pick a different type of cuisine each month, to keep the range of ingredients more limited. So if you’re making Korean food and buy a tub of gochujang paste, then you’ve got more chances to use it up.
• Before you buy a niche ingredient, Google for substitutes. Sometimes you have something very similar already - you don’t need to buy the gochujang of you already have miso paste, chilli powder and paprika.

I agree that you need to move away from the recipes if you want to become more flexible and intuitive with your cooking.

May I suggest you look into the meal packs app from Sorted Food. I’ve used it (but I preferred just normal meal planning, I don’t find it exhausting or hard). It’s specifically designed to reduce food wastage.

Bananas and tahini are an excellent snack or porridge topping. Fruit and tahini is a winning snack plate anyway, but bananas are the best. You are all welcome.

I hate tahini only because the empty jars are a pain to wash for the recycling. Still, I buy it very regularly and only rarely use it in a recipe

I sympathise OP. I find the idea of planning food and then having various bits of things that don't fit in other things and might go off just stressful.

I do all the cleaning, laundry and ironing and DH does all the food planning, shopping and cooking. Even the most grim and tedious of other household tasks is preferable to food related jobs to me.

I get what you are talking about too.

What has worked for me

• make a list of the meals we enjoy

- keep all the recipes of the meals we enjoy in a notebook so they are always at hand!!

• create a weekly menu from that list, Incl lunches (I’m not going to have a ham sandwich with crisp everyday). I have a list of a 4 weekly menu. None of them have the same meal on it and we rotate those 4.
• sit down and shop for that menu each week. If I/we don’t fancy something, it gets replaced. There is always one meal that is ‘open’ so we try something new then.

I started that when the dcs were little and I just couldn’t think of a anything to prepare in the evening. I was too frazzled. We rarely had the ingredients I needed etc…
The most important step for me was to have all the recipes we like in one place! Otherwise we forget what we enjoyed, can’t find the recipe again etc…

App called magic fridge, you pick the ingredients you always/sometimes/never have in your cupboard and then choose what you want to cook with (beetroot for example) and you've got a recipe !

They are quite basic meals though, no fine dining but at least you've got a recipe to follow.

I think we were in a quite similar position when our first one was born, I had SO much time in my hands so I could spend my day thinking what I would fancy that day, browse recipes and the pop out with the buggy to get the ingredients. Every day we used to eat something we really, really liked. Then slowly gave up and introduced pasta Tuesdays, cooked massive lasagnas we eat for two days etc. I now have two young children who want to play, they do after school activities, need help with homework, got my own hobbies etc - I can't spend my life in the kitchen ! We do try new recipes every now and then but not every day or week. Lower the bar.

Btw, I found two things by having some weekly menus (that we regularly review and modify when we have enough of said menu/summer is coming etc…)

• the things we had got bored of become quite nice to eat again after a couple of years. It’s nice to revisit some old favourite and enjoy them again.

• I am able to be more flexible now than I was before. I wouldn’t change the list of spices for example but I will modify quantities (always less or no chilli for me), swap something ingredients for another (eg some dishes work very well with chicken instead of prawns etc…). But it took time for me to relax into that. In the mean time, knowing. Had all the right ingredients made a huge difference.

• I haven’t found major issues with waste ‘because you had 3 peppers in the pack and you only need 1 or 2’. Quite the opposite. By buying only what I need and know will get eaten, I have much less food waste. Plus you can freeze stuff you don’t use etc…

• one dish that is proving very helpful again and again is stir fry vegetables as a side. It allows us to use a lot of vegetables without worrying about which ones you need. If we indeed do have some peppers spare, they’ll go in there, esp f they start looking a bit sorry.

I could have written your post word for word love cooking, hate meal planning, generally frugal but know it would save me money (and time overall) to meal plan. So I'm loving this thread, and reading other posters tipes with interest, thankyou.

I've just stopped a few weeks of gousto and have got renewed vigour to make a meal plan work. I'm going to sort it into bags/boxes in the fridge when I get home from shopping, so in effect it's like a gousto for me on the weekdays, just have to put in the work of planning and shopping at the weekend.

My freezer is overloaded 😳 with yellow sticker meat, so that tends to be a starting point - I find something in there I want to cook this week, look up a recipe, see what veg it's going to leave me with, google a recipe for using that veg and hopefully it coincides with another piece of meat from the freezer (or bodge the recipe to make it work), and so on from there. I'm always reading cookbooks and food blogs so I'll generally have a couple of ideas from things I've seen over the past week, that sometimes is what steers my 'starting point' or if an offer leaflet comes through from a shop, even if I don't shop there it gives me an idea of something to make or use.

It seems like you need to practice thinking about "what else would this [main ingredient] go in?" if you want to develop the mental muscle that will make this stuff easier, OP

Oh also, check out The Kitchen Revolution, it's a book, don't think they've got a website - it's 52 different weekly meal plans based on what's in season. For each week you get 6 dinner recipes plus 1 dessert all cooked from 1 basket of groceries....Ta dah! They have done the hard work of working out how to use up the half packets for you + me !! (Shopping list already written for you too)

Each week 1 of the recipes is always a double qty to freeze half, so over time you're building up a stash of 'ready meals' for the 'night off' days on the plan, or you can use those days to eat out, etc.

It's a brilliant concept.. the only reason I'm not still doing it is I found I only liked some of the recipes in the week so was trying to sub them out myself for something different, so might as well do the whole meal plan myself anyway. Would highly recommend you give it a go. It's given me some good ideas of meals that 'pair', ie can be made from the same basket of ingredients.

You say "there's always an ingredient missing" if you try to plan from what's in the cupboard. It sounds like you're not very flexible with recipes? I find that as long as you have a stock of the specific herbs and spices and basics like milk, most ingredients can be swapped or omitted.

I started out being stressed that I only had swede instead of turnip (or maybe it was the other way round), but after being caught without an ingredient a few times I realised that a lot of the time it really doesn't matter.

I suppose I'm saying... try the receipt with some adaptations. It'll probably be fine!

I found this web site

www.escoffieronline.com/top-apps-for-finding-recipes-for-ingredients-you-already-have/

That says….

Do your fridge and pantry look like they could comprise a mystery basket from “Chopped”? Does it feel like you always have a handful of random ingredients with no particular direction for using them?

If you’re constantly searching for ways to use the ingredients you already have on hand, look no further. There’s an app for that. In fact, there are many. Here’s our roundup of the top apps for finding recipes for ingredients you already have.

OP I totally feel your pain. I sympathise!

I love cooking but I loathe meal planning. I find it weird how people only seem to plan one meal a day - since lockdown/wfh I now have to plan breakfast lunch and dinner for 4 people 7 days a week, plans have to work around everyone’s shifting work and after school club patterns, be seasonal, be healthy (nothing convenience or ready made), be quick to make (not too much cooking or fuss in the kitchen), not repetitive…it’s exhausting.

What really pees me off is when I think I’ve got the bloody thing cracked and then DS/DD/DH says “oh I don’t fancy that tonight, let’s have [insert random combination of ingredients planned for other meals] instead” aaarrrrrggh

I won’t do meal delivery boxes because of the expense and the waste.

I would love to hand this off to someone, anyone else! But I’m stuck with it!

@Glitterspy

OP I totally feel your pain. I sympathise!

I love cooking but I loathe meal planning. I find it weird how people only seem to plan one meal a day - since lockdown/wfh I now have to plan breakfast lunch and dinner for 4 people 7 days a week, plans have to work around everyone’s shifting work and after school club patterns, be seasonal, be healthy (nothing convenience or ready made), be quick to make (not too much cooking or fuss in the kitchen), not repetitive…it’s exhausting.

What really pees me off is when I think I’ve got the bloody thing cracked and then DS/DD/DH says “oh I don’t fancy that tonight, let’s have [insert random combination of ingredients planned for other meals] instead” aaarrrrrggh

I won’t do meal delivery boxes because of the expense and the waste.

I would love to hand this off to someone, anyone else! But I’m stuck with it!

Maybe try not to be too accommodating as you cant always please everyone. If your husband or children just fancy something else than you cooked, they can fix themselves what they want. /Obviously if you have little children its a bit different with them./

Great to hear that some people also hate food deliver boxes.
I love my glass lunchboxes that I use to pick up meals in. I cant stand all that crap plastic packiging and the waste it is creating.

OP, Simply Cook might appeal to you

www.simplycook.com