Do you meal plan?

AnAnxiousCorgi , 11 months ago

I don’t, I really wish I did more, but I’ve found it a difficult habit to develop and keep up with for some reason, although I have tried several times.

One of the most successful methods I’ve had was with my sous vide cooker. I would go to Costco (/Sam’s Club/BJ’s/whatever bulk goods store) and buy a variety of meat, couple packs of steaks, pork chops, chicken, etc. Once home I would season and portion the meat out into individual servings, then vacuum seal and freeze. Before work every morning I’d throw a frozen protein in the water bath and go to work, which was only 5 minutes away from home, at lunch time I’d clock out, rush home, quickly sear my whatever was cooking and add a can of vegetables or some other leftover for a side. Was a phenomenal system, but only lasted a few months before the job ended, and just haven’t tried to pick up the habit again.

At one point I set up Mealie, a self-hosted recipe tracker/scraper that worked well and helped to generate some grocery lists. That was nice because I was able to select different things I wanted to make over the course of a week and have it generate a list of what I need ingredient wise.

However I never really “stuck with it” as a habit. Mealie is really cool in that it can (theoretically) scrape recipes out of other websites, so it centralizes your recipes and strips the “blog” fluff out of them. But in practice it wasn’t great at doing that, it relied on very specific metadata tags that just aren’t present/formatted properly in a lot of recipe blogs, so it wound up being more trouble to use than it’s worth. If I were more dedicated I might be willing to manually transcribe the recipes, but I ain’t lol.

Anyways, apologies, I realize that’s kinda ranty and doesn’t really answer your question. I’m posting partially cause I hope other people will share their meal-prep-planning and I can steal ideas haha.

Krzak , 11 months ago

Not really, I can’t tell what I’d like to eat more than 2-3 days forward. I won’t eat what I don’t want to so it’s not that easy

Okokimup , 1 year ago

Every Wednesday. That’s when sales flyers come out for Aldi (website) and Food Lion (app). I make a list of all the produce going on sale. I keep a spreadsheet full of recipes organized by produce ingredient, and pick out recipes for the week based on sales and anything in my freezer that needs using.

I also have certain weekly rules. I plan 4 dinners and 3 breakfasts. In all these meals, only 2 can have meat, at least 2 must use legumes, at least one must have spinach, and at least one must have fatty fish (tuna or salmon, doesn’t count as meat). I aim for an anti-inflammatory diet, so I try to include that type of ingredient in each meal. It’s challenging, but fun to plan and has greatly increased my family’s nutrition.

I use Evernote on my phone to plan meals. I keep a list there of all foods in my freezer (meats, produce, breads, whole meals) and the date they were put in. Excel on my laptop to store and organize recipes. And the Anytime app to keep grocery lists for all the stores I visit.

roostopher , 1 year ago

My wife and I have been planning 2-3 dinners per week and we double the recipe for them so we can just heat up leftovers for dinner or lunches the next day. It’s been a good compromise between the ‘make everything on Sunday’ style prepping and making something new every night. We still have flexibility in what we each each day, but we also only need to cook half as often.

We try (keyword try, doesn’t always work out) to pick recipes with overlapping ingredients so there’s asittle waste as possible.

Google shopping list is what we use to keep track of things since it has Google Home / Google Assistant integration and can connect to both of our accounts so everything is in-sync.

bobert , 1 year ago

I try to grocery shop once a week and pickup whatever looks good or fresh that I can use in a variety of meals throughout the week. My goal is to buy a small amount of higher quality things that I can use in 2-3 meals.

Lately though I’ve just been going to the store when I want to make something and it’s much more stressful that way. I need to get back into doing more planning.