How to meal plan for a week without a recipe book

Start with dinners

Dinners drive the shopping list and most of the cooking time. Fill the dinner row first, for the whole week. Put the easy ones on the busy days and leave one evening open for leftovers, a night out or whatever is left in the fridge.

Then lunches and breakfasts

Lunches are often tomorrow’s version of tonight: cook a little more and write “leftovers” in the next day’s lunch cell. Breakfasts repeat; two or three that the household likes are enough, written once and copied across.

Look in the kitchen before you write the list

• Open the fridge, the freezer and the pantry and write down what should be used this week.
• Build the first two dinners around those things.
• Only then write the shopping list, aisle by aisle, from the grid.

Shop from the list, in the order of the shop

A list grouped by aisle (fruit and vegetables, then the counters, then dairy, then the dry goods, then frozen) is faster to shop and harder to forget. Tick what is already at home before you leave.

Keep the weeks that worked

At the end of the week, tick it off and note what worked and what did not. After a month you have your own set of weeks to copy, which is the real time saver.

A planner that already has your name, your rows and your rules on it makes this easier to keep up. That is what Meal Plan Maker is for; the meals stay yours.

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