To ask those who like food and cook from scratch without getting bored what meals do you cook most often, what does a typical week look like and what is your most used cookery book?

[Chi11iFlak3]

I’m bored of meal planning, also how do others who cook from scratch every night plan the week?

Mince/lentils and pasta with lots of veg
Chicken stir-fry with lots of veg and noodles
Left over chicken add spices and make into curry
Potato wedges and salmon in the oven
Pork steaks slow cooked with tomato pasta and veg
Add spices to left over pork and make into a curry with homemade naan ( self raising flour and yoghurt)
Roast chicken with roast potatoes and parsnips plus a fruit crumble for Sunday lunch

At the supermarket I buy big packs of pork and chicken as they are cheaper and last for 2 days
Also a big pack of kale as can be added to all stir fries or curries or mince
Cabbage for the roast and salmon

I use Google instead of recipe books for doing things with random vegetables. Tesco magazine can give good ideas

Chat GPT. It will even give you a shopping list for whatever supermarket you use, estimate the cost of each meal and tell you what can be batch cooked. Bloody brilliant.

Two others that we always come back to
insanely easy fish pie (I don’t even make mash, I just break up ready made straight onto the top and bake) https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/fish/best-fish-pie/

and this delish sweet potato chilli, make as much as you can and freeze in portions, have with microwave rice, tortilla chips, sour cream and cheese! https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables/sweet-potato-chilli/

Ottolenghi simple is my most used book at the moment. Every recipe is a cracker.

I regularly batch cook, then just take something out to defrost in the morning. Things I often make:-

Lasagne
Fish pie
Spaghetti bolognese
Macaroni cheese
Shepherd's pie
Salmon carbonara
Fish cakes
Chicken korma
Chilli con carne
Mustard chicken
Hungarian goulash
Spanokopita
Chicken pasta bake
Sausage and bean stew
Burgers
Tuna and sweetcorn burgers
Chicken enchiladas
Creamy beef and shells
Toad in the hole
Tuna and broccoli pasta bake
Salmon and potato bake
Ghoulash pasta
Cowboy pie
Greek chicken and rice
Homemade tomato sauce

And probably more I can't think of offhand 🤣 Oh and I love my Mary Berry cookbook, I taught myself to cook from it 😊

Nigel slater cookbooks. I have about 12 recipes that I don’t need a book for that I can do for midweek meals. And then weekends I can go to the farmers market and get whatever looks nice and look up how to cook it.

lasagne
spag bol
“Turkish” chicken and rice / wraps with humous salad
homade pesto with various nuts
roast dinner
steak
ratatouille & jacket potato veggie sausage
miso salmon / steamed green veg
crispy tofu stir fry
prawn stirfry
Indian Curry
thai green curry
lentil shepherds pie
roast veg & lentils with feta
various salads
tuna steak

Oh fish pie
macaroni cheese
pulled pork
fajitas n guacamole cheese sour cream etc
picky bits!!!

I cook a couple times per week, but meal planning bores me stiff and I never know what I'll fancy eating so far in advance.

I cook what I fancy, or what's on hand. Yesterday I cooked two leftover chicken breasts with some broccoli and carrots.

This morning I was watching a video and someone was making fritters, so I made some around midday and that served for lunch and dinner with some salad.

Tomorrow I might make some Alfredo as my daughter's been requesting that and I have the ingredients.

Last week it was some good old-fashioned Jamaican food, so who knows what the rest of the week will bring (not particularly helpful) 🤷🏾‍♀️.

We don't meal plan and are sort of 50/50 re making the meals. However, I'm throwing this one in as a really easy suggestion from Leon and so tasty. Made it a few weeks ago and would easily slot it into a meal planner if doing that kind of thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/17/spicy-chicken-couscous-recipe-allegra-mcevedy?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Usual:

mince dish (bolognese / chilli / cottage pie / homemade burgers)
chicken dish (Cajun, fajita or bang bang rice bowls)
pasta dish (pesto, tuna, pasta bake with a homemade tomato and cream cheese sauce, Cajun chicken)
something easy like sausage and mash, jacket potatoes and various toppings
roast dinner (everything from scratch from cauli cheese sauce to Yorkshires!)

other things:
leftovers so if we had a roast chicken I’d do a chicken biryani or something like that
stuffed chicken (pesto, tomatoes and mozzarella with homemade chips and veg) or stuff it with chorizo, or Boursin for homemade kievs

I have a child with eating issues and so it is really restrictive and often means making something different for them so I did a meal plan where I based the carb around what DC would eat and varied it across the week (so Monday was always pasta for example) and then planned something for the rest of us that went with that with lots of batch cooked frozen stuff (lasagne/spaghetti Bolognese, curries and Dahl, chilli etc). I found that quite helpful to have a structure for the week but then could vary around it a bit. Usually just planned the week nights (Mon to Thursday) as they are hectic and busy and hard to plan too far ahead on weekends as plans could change. Not much help on recipe books but have several favourite recipes that I have gathered over the years and otherwise either try something new from books (Leon, happy pear, ottolenghi, rukmini iyer) or BBC good food website or Jamie Oliver website. Have also used hello fresh, mindful chef etc and kept any particularly good recipes from there and just ordered the ingredients myself

I use Gousto - it’s a kind of meal planning and gives infinite variety. £50 a week for 2 adults for 5 dinners feels good value to me as no shopping time required. I still get the satisfaction of cooking but with way less thought in the preparation

I cook all meals from scratch, but I don’t really meal plan. I cook on few things on Sunday evening and we eat that for mon & tuesday. These are usually more elaborate meals. Then tuesday night I marinate some meat and chuck that in the oven for dinner wednesday/thursday. The side will be some salads or roasted/steamed veg. Then friday just loads of starters like calamari, chicken wings, halloumi sticks etc. with a bowl of salad. Similar starters for saturday! And I do cook a bit on Saturday and ofcourse main cooking on Sunday. The most used cook books in our house are the ones my mum wrote for me when I first left home for my first job and moved to a different city and the second cook books is one I copied off my mum just before I got married.

I'm pretty bored of what we are cooking now. Could do with some recipes. Usually do the standards like lasagne and pies, and our own versions of different cusines, but a good, fast recipe we do is chicken piccata. We don't really cook anything really expensive, so I think we are pretty inventive with our budget.

I find our pressure cooker has been a godsend. You can cook meat chunks and get them tender in about 45 mins for stews, hotpots and pies. Really speeds things up. A good flatbread recipe is really good if you want to do kebabs from scratch. Make your own crispy onions too. They are addictive as crack though. Fab on curries and burgers.

Making your own turkey/chicken meatballs with Thai seasoning are good lunchy snacks to have with salad too. I knocked some up in 10 mins today and chucked them in the oven.

Will be looking on here for inspiration.

how do others who cook from scratch every night plan the week?

On Saturday morning I plan the following week. It's just me and teen DS at home. I look at what we're doing each evening e.g. sport, revision (GCSEs), work calls (me), going out socially and plan accordingly.

At the moment we're rotating round thai fish curry, chicken curry (with a paste pot), chilli con carne, Chinese chicken, salmon.

If I'm out socially he cooks himself a steak. If he's out socially I'll rejoice in not needing to cook a meal (older DS is 26 and I've been raising kids FOR EVER!) and just graze or scrambled eggs.

I cook the chilli at the w/e cos it takes ages, but it makes 2 meals so I'll freeze those. Chicken curry makes a mess so that's for when I've got more time.
The others are pretty quick. Often I'll prepare the thai curry base early evening, we then do our sports and finish cooking it when I get back (20 mins with the rice and veg). Chinese chicken needs a marinade so again I'll do all the fiddly chopping early evening and then throw it all together later.

DS is studying hard (I think) at the moment but normally he'll do the salmon with skin on fries in the air fryer and things like that. He helps meal plan and we shop together because he's a gym rat and eats me out of house and home very well.

My Delia cookbook is falling apart. Also use Mary Berry's cookbooks a bit. I use the recipetineats website a lot.

When the kids were little I batch cooked and froze

chicken curry
bolognese
chilli
beef casserole
tomato sauce
chicken cacciatore

every second sunday and that's pretty much what we had during the week. Maybe did take out one day of the weekend and a roast or bbq on Sunday.

Now it isn't so frantic I cook the above and also fish pie, honey and garlic chicken/salmon, salmon with blackened lime, pasta with mushroom sauce, stir fries, chicken in black bean sauce, spanish spiced chicken with mint sauce (Bobby Flay recipe), slow cooked lamb, sausages onions and mashed potatoes with cabbage (last night's dinner), and will try new recipes quite often.

We typically have

1. mince 5% fat - cottage pie, spaghetti bolognaise or chili con carne
2. sausages, mash, onion gravy and two green veg
3. rump steak with air fryer chips, mushrooms, peas and sweetcorn
4. pork medallions - as Korean pork kebabs, rice and broccoli; or pork with fresh fennel, onions, garlic, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, oil, pasta and green veg
5. lamb chops with air fryer chips and veg; or lamb shish kebab in pitta bread with salad; or lamb saag curry and rice
6. chicken fajitas; or chicken stuffed with ham and cheese on top, with Greek lemon roast potatoes and Greek salad; or chicken with cashew nuts and rice; or paella
7. roast beef/chicken/beef

I mainly use Hairy Bikers Diet books, Fast 800, Weight Watchers, Recipe Tin Eats (online), BBC Good Food (online) and Good Housekeeping. DH has heart problems, so we try to eat a low fat diet.

Oooh salmon poke bowls sound yum, never thought to do that before thanks!

Another vote for BBC good food as a place to start

some meals take 2-3 days of soaking beans prep (Mexican buffet)
so days we grill kippers and have with bread and butter (15 minutes tops)

most of the time it’s in between

The curries are great, I also love the rustic pasta and the louisianna linguine

I get a fruit & veg box delivered each week, and they email on Tuesday telling me what's arriving on Thursday. So every Tuesday I make a vague meal plan that allows for chopping and changing, and use what's in the veg box to guide me. eg this week the veg box had tomatoes, broccoli, potatoes, onions, carrots, a bag of salad leaves and some leeks.

I don't plan more than 5 as the other two days we'll have leftovers or something from the freezer. If I plan 7 full days, we always have too much. I do a lot of one-pot and traybake meals where it's all in one, or protein+starch cooked together plus a green salad or a vegetable on the side.

Meal plan was:

• roast chicken stuffed with bread and tomatoes with orzo, eaten with the salad
• chicken & veg soup with egg noodles
• beef, potato and carrot japanese hot pot with rice and some more salad
• sausage, leek & broccoli pasta
• fried tofu and peppers with pork mince, scrambled eggs and tomato

I have a lot of cookbooks, which is how I don't get bored. I also follow a lot of food instagram accounts. Often I'll take a cookbook and plan a week's meals out of it, and then move on to another one. Right now I'm cooking from a book called umai: recipes from a Japanese home kitchen by Millie Tsukagoshi Lagares which is where the hotpot and tofu recipes came from.

Kimchi Fried Rice
Bolognese
Roast chicken
Chicken noodle soup
Beetroot risotto
Sausage casserole
Jamie 5 ingredient chickpea pork and chard
Jamie 5 ingredient speedy spinach paneer curry
Peanut butter Chicken curry
Pork and apple orzotto

Jamie 5 ingredient cookbook is a good one for us!
And we use Tesco meal planner and ChatGPT to give ideas for alternatives

It’s a mishmash of planned weeks and wing it weeks here - currently mid way through a wing it one.
This week has been:
Sunday - roast beef and all the trimmings then a lemon curd cake experiment that came good
Monday - Vietnamese rice pancakes (banh xiao) with pork and prawns
Tuesday - Thai style pork (other half of the tenderloin from Monday) simmered in yellow curry with rice and pickled bean sprouts (also left over from Monday)
Wednesday - chicken fajitas with avocado salsa (avo wasn’t ripe enough to make guacamole but the salsa experiment was a success)
Thursday will be cottage pie I think but subject to change on a whim. Beef mince based anyway…

I don't meal plan or read cook books. I tend to make dishes that can be made with variations of similar ingredients as i found when i planned certain meals it was harder to stick to a plan.

I make a rotation of:
Vegetable chilli (quorn mince and red kidney beans) with rice or on tortilla chips
Vegetable bolognaise (quorn mince and any veg, usually red pepper, courgette and mushrooms) with any kind of pasta
Aubergine curry (but any roast veg works, sometimes with chickpeas) - https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/roasted-aubergine-tomato-curry
Mushroom Risotto, or leek, pea and goats cheese risotto
Sometimes we have this red thai curry dish (switch prawns for more sweet potato) https://www.nigella.com/recipes/red-prawn-and-mango-curry

I always cook more than is needed, so some nights i am just defrosting one of these from the freezer.

My husband does half of the cooking, and on his nights he makes chips, peas, sweetcorn, carrots, brocolli, and chicken nuggets/vegetable burger. We also have frozen pizza one night a week.