Ep.5: How I Meal Plan By Numbers

"What's for Dinner?" isn't just a culinary question it's a string of decisions that ask you to know what's in the pantry, the complexities of the family timetable, whether the chicken in the fridge is still viable or what time the supermarket shop is being delivered. That’s invisible labour, and it’s exhausting, even if you’ve cooked thousands of meals.

My meal planning method is about outsourcing those choices so “future us” can simply follow the list. You’ll hear why planning and writing a shopping list together can cut your supermarket spend and reduce food waste, plus how a small buffer day gives you breathing room to change your mind. We also talk about matching your weekly meal plan to your real energy levels so Tuesday chaos gets a genuinely easy dinner, while Sunday can hold the more creative cooking.

The heart of the system is a simple “meal matrix”: categories that fit the way your household truly eats, like Sunday lunch, leftovers, pasta, veggie night, fish night, kids’ tea and quick meals. Build a short list of reliable options under each category and you’ll stop reinventing dinner from scratch every day. Keep one backup meal in your pocket, raid your freezer and cupboards before you shop, and remember the list is not the boss of you, it’s your support.

If you want calmer weeknights, cheaper shops, and fewer last-minute dinner spirals, listen now. Subscribe, share this with a fellow home cook, and leave a review so more kitchen heroes can find Cook and Nourish.

Transcript

Welcome To Cook And Nourish

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello, lovely cooks, and welcome back to Cook and Nourish. This is the podcast about fantastic kitchen heroes like you who get food on the table. I'm your host, Claire Serene, and I've been planning meals for 30 years, I realised. So today we're going to talk about the relentless task of coming up with what's for dinner and how to make that planning easier. I have a meal planning method that I've been using for about a decade now, and it helps me take the stress out of thinking what's for dinner and it stops me wasting money in the supermarket. But first, I did not expect after the last episode that I would receive quite so many pictures of brilliantly organized Tupperware drawers and tin cupboards. But I absolutely loved seeing them. There were so many people getting rid of loads of small inconveniences in their kitchen, and I'm glad to say that many of you have felt the benefit. I had uh a bittersweet message from Jane in Wiltshire who said she's been holding on to her mum's old kitchen equipment but realized it was taking up physical and mental space in her kitchen and her life. So she got rid of a broken blender from 1982. I would have liked to see that blender. She donated a set of casserole dishes that she knows she'll never use. And then she promoted a set of her mum's dinner plates to everyday use so that her family are using them in the here and now. And I just thought that was brilliant and brave of you, Jane, and I hope you're feeling lighter as consequence. So back to today, and it's all about meal planning. Coming up with a week's worth of meals 52 times a year, it's a massive and tedious job. And not only does the home cook have to prepare the food, we're often the ones expected to come up with the menu too. When people talk about invisible labour, it's jobs like this that they're talking about. Coming up with what's for dinner isn't just about thinking of dishes, it's making those dishes match the week ahead. We cross-reference the pantry with the family timetable, and we have to work out whether the chicken in the fridge will make it to Tuesday. We keep a running tally of how much bread is left for Pat lunches and anticipate the needs of a guest coming on Saturday. By the time we actually start cooking, we've made a hundred tiny decisions. So it's no wonder that sometimes you end up staring at the fridge like it's a crossword puzzle you just can't solve. There is often a deafening silence when I ask my family what they fancy eating next week. So the decision's just left up to me. And decision fatigue is very real. Despite the fact that I've cooked literally thousands of meals, I can go blank and forget what I can even make. My secret is letting past me help future me. I absolutely love a list, so meal planning works really well for me. I think once and then I just do what the list tells me for the rest of the week, and it makes me much happier. But meal planning isn't for everyone. If you've tried to meal plan and you find you can't stick to it, it makes you feel guilty, food ends up going to waste, then you might find a future episode about using your freezer as a supermarket a bit more helpful. But I urge you to keep listening because you don't have to meal plan an entire week. Planning even a couple of meals can save you money and time. Apart from not having to think every single day what's for dinner, meal planning can also save you proper money at the supermarket. When I plan my meals, I simultaneously write a shopping list. And research has shown that people save between 15 and 40% on their food bills when they use a shopping list. The savings happen in a couple of ways. You're less likely to impulse buy when you've got a list, and you're much less likely to buy something you already have in the house, so it reduces waste as well. I do my meal planning on a Tuesday night with a glass of something nice, and then I shop on a Thursday. And I build in that Wednesday buffer because it gives me time to change my mind or remember something that I totally forgot first time round because I'm 48 and my memory is optional. I keep my meal list in the kitchen, and then each morning I look at it, it tells me what I'm going to cook that night, and I add notes for myself like take sausages out of the freezer in the morning or switch the slow cooker on before football pickup. And the little list is a godsend to me during the week. My planning isn't about being a perfectly organized person, it's about outsourcing decisions. When I write that list on a Tuesday, I'm essentially Executive Claire making those decisions, and then I fire her and become worker Claire for the rest of the week. And worker claire just looks at the list and says, tuna pasta, and I make tuna pasta. My list is the gift of not having to think, especially at a time of day when I'm already really tired. Before I give you my meal planning method, there are a few key elements I always consider when I'm building my weekly meal plan. First one is how much time and energy will I have on each day? The second one is what do I already have in the house that can make dinner? And the third one is which meal is on hand if life goes sideways. Matching your meal planning to how much time and energy you're going to have is the number one key to success. If your Tuesdays are a nightmare, then you need your easiest meal solution for that day, like reheatable leftovers or a 15-minute pasta dish, or just straight up pizza delivery. Then if you find yourself with more time on a Sunday, you can let your creativity loose and maybe try your hand at a Wellington. For a busy household, it's almost impossible to keep the same level of creativity every single night. But it doesn't mean that dinner can't be tasty. Matching your energy to your meal plan is why I'm so passionate about simple meals. Because if you plan to make something simple in a 30-minute cooking window, and then you make that, your brain goes, Oh, well done you. We set out to give everyone an omelette, and we did it. Mission accomplished. And rather than planning something with 16 ingredients that you think you should cook when you know you'll be completely knackered, it's entirely counterproductive and doesn't give you that sense of satisfaction and completion. Having a good rootle around your cupboards before you meal plan is a great way to save money and inspire you. I looked in my dry cupboard yesterday where I keep my tins and my pastas and things like that. And I realized there had obviously been a buy one, get one free deal at some point on massive bags of penne. And there was a huge bag of penne sat at the back of the cupboard that I had totally forgotten about. And so next week is definitely penne. So it's always worth checking in your freezer for leftovers you've already made or sausages you've already frozen that can become the backbone of Wednesday's dinner. You know I love a backup meal because they're my mental safety net when things go wrong. So I always check that I have all the ingredients in for at least one backup meal in the week. So, how do I meal plan? About a decade ago, I started writing down meals I made as part of my recovery from postnatal depression. The activity was basically to try and retrain my brain to recognize success. And the success was that I was feeding people, and feeding people is a big deal. So I started writing down all the meals that I made for me and the kids. And what began as a therapeutic exercise grew into a cheat sheet that I still use today. I started to group my meals into headings that made sense to me. And this became the foundation of my meal planning by numbers routine. Because I looked at the meals and I saw that these groups regularly showed up. One, Sunday lunch, two, leftovers, three, pasta, four, veggie night, five, fish night, six, kids' tea, or basically something with chips, and seven, quick meals. Almost everything broke down into these seven categories. They showed up again and again, and I quickly realized that Sunday lunch was the linchpin because it always made a leftover meal. So I wrote down four of my Sunday lunches: roast chicken, roast beef, roast pork, and lambshanks. And then I wrote down four of the leftover meals that I can make with that. So chicken Caesar salad, Mongolian beef, pork cabbage noodles, and lamtigine. And then looking at me was two meals a week for the next month, just there in front of me. So I took the idea further and I wrote down four pasta meals, four veggie meals, four fish dishes, four quick meals, and four kids' meals. That one exercise gave me a month's worth of dishes without a single repetition. Just that one. I started planning our meals by choosing one meal from every category, and our weekly meal plan appeared in minutes. I literally just wrote down the categories in the back of a big A4 notepad, and I'd flip to the front, write down one of the recipes from each of the seven categories, and then add a shopping list. Nothing fancy, but oh my goodness, did it make a difference. I had two toddlers, I had an exhausted brain, and this little bit of guided weekly help made a massive difference to my life. Over time my list grew into ten categories, but that can become too much choice. So it's best to start small. But breaking down your eating into easier to choose sections makes it an awful lot easier to decide what's for dinner. I don't always use all seven categories. Either if there's something special happening in the week or I know we're going out for dinner, then I only need five categories or six categories. I have a tendency to forget I can make certain things. I make a really good chili concane, but I totally forget that I can make that. And so if it's not on my list, it never shows up because I can't remember that I can make it. I think people confuse meal planning with having to be healthier. A meal plan doesn't have to be cooking from scratch every night or filled with 40 veggies you don't normally buy. The real life you who is slammed on a Wednesday hasn't got time for imaginary you thinking you're gonna cook a chicken balancing with fennel risotto. Real life Wednesday you needs a quick and easy solution. So plan that. So how do you actually start going about making this meal plan without it being another job? Grab a piece of paper and draw a grid with seven boxes on it, and don't try to be fancy. Just think back over the last couple of weeks of what you really ate. And if you had to soup twice, then congratulations, toasties is now a category. And your categories are just a meal matrix. Over the next few weeks, you can add the meals that you make into this matrix, see where they fit in the categories, and before you know it, you've got a whack of meals that future you can dip into. Your meal plan can also be totally flexible. I might plan to cook pasture on a Tuesday, but it ends up being more convenient for a Wednesday. And this happens a lot because the list is a seven-day menu, really, that I can rearrange to suit me as the week unfolds. That list is not the boss of you, you are the boss of the list. If you have a weekly hero meal that everybody loves to eat on a Friday, then that's a whole category. If you always eat spag ball on a Friday, Friday spag ball is a category. My kids would gladly eat sushi every week, but I have a mortgage to pay, so we don't do that. There are more than likely patterns to the way you already cook. So tonight you can just sit down and have a think about them. As you're clearing away the plates, or you just get a minute in the kitchen, jot down what you ate, do that for a few nights, and you'll start to see your categories emerging. Maybe you're a bowl family or a meat and two veg champion of the world, whatever it is, identifying your natural patterns makes planning feel less like an alien task and more like just acknowledging the truth of your table. You're already a meal planner. You've been doing it for years just to survive. And what we want to do now is allow all of that hard work to start working for you and in the process give you some of your brain space back. Before I leave you, I'm gonna ask you to take a minute tonight to think about the kinds of meals you really enjoy making. Do you love serving up massive bowls of pasta or making spicy vegetarian dishes or classic meat and two veg dishes? The meals you love making should headline your meal planning. Because when you cook happy, the food just tastes better. I absolutely love making Sunday lunch, which is why it's the linchpin of my planning. Thank you for spending this time with me at Cook and Nourish. I hope you eat something ludicrously delicious this week. And until next time, happy cooking.