![]() Or instead of planning for a full week in advance, start by just planning a couple of days in advance.” Over time, as you get more comfortable, you can scale up and start planning out two or three meals a day. “For whatever reason, I’ve always found them less intimidating than dinner. “If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the idea of meal planning, start by just planning lunches or breakfasts for the week,” says Erica Adler, a personal chef, recipe developer, and co-author of the ebook Meal Prep Made Simple. If you want to try meal planning, but it seems intimidating, start small with just one meal a day. Meal planning allows for more variety, if you have the time to cook on weekdays - but it still saves you a lot of time by accomplishing most of the menu logistics and recipe selection in advance. If you like variety, though, or hate leftovers, meal prepping might not be for you, since it can often require eating the same meal multiple times in one week. Meal prepping can be better for those who can commit several hours to cooking on weekends but don’t have time to cook on weekdays, since meals are already prepared and portioned and you can simply grab them out of the fridge. Which strategy is right for you? It depends on your needs and your schedule. Meal prepping, which might make you think of rows of Pinterest-perfect pre-portioned Tupperware containers, is the habit of preparing batched meals ahead of time, often on Sundays, so that you don’t have to prepare meals during the week. Meal planning is different from meal prepping. ![]() Meal planning is the act of picking out the recipes you’ll cook each day of the week, like setting a menu for the week ahead. What’s meal planning, and what’s the difference between that and meal prepping? And you don’t have to be an organizational wizard to start doing it - you can build a system that works for your needs, lifestyle, and schedule. If you want to start cooking more in 2023, starting to meal plan might be a great resolution for you. Meal planning can help you manage that mental load so that cooking dinner feels less like a chore and begins to become something you actually enjoy. Putting healthy and delicious meals on the table every day is about far more than just the actual act of cooking: There is a vast mental load that goes into cooking, from selecting recipes to making grocery lists to keeping tabs on what ingredients you have on hand and what needs to be used up, in addition to remembering family members’ varying likes and dislikes and dietary restrictions. And I’m almost never stressed about what to cook for dinner on any given night because I’ve already decided ahead of time - and I always have the exact ingredients I need for that recipe in my fridge. It would not be an exaggeration to say that meal planning changed my life: I’ve become a better home cook since I started meal planning, becoming more confident in my cooking skills and more adventurous in the types of recipes I try out. (During that time, I also became a parent, making time, energy, and money ever more finite resources in my household meal planning has helped make things slightly more manageable.) I have a searchable database of more than 1,500 recipes that I’ve bookmarked over the years. ![]() This organizational strategy has made my weeknight dinners easier and more efficient, saved me time and money, and kept my life organized. ![]() For the past six years, I have been devoted to the strategy of planning out the meals I’ll cook each week. And if you’re busy, or just overwhelmed by other parts of your life, figuring out how to feed yourself three times a day, every single day, becomes even more challenging.īut there is a way to make cooking dinner much simpler and far less anxiety-inducing: meal planning. Without a plan, figuring out dinner might involve running out to the grocery store after work to buy ingredients for the recipe you’ve just decided to make and finally eating at 9, or it might end in giving up and ordering takeout once again because you just can’t figure out what to cook. Have you ever stared at the contents of your refrigerator at 7 pm, trying to figure out what you might be able to concoct with the random assortment of items you have on hand? Deciding what to cook for dinner every night, whether you’re feeding yourself, a partner, or an entire family, is a task that involves far more mental work than just cooking - it also takes planning, preparation, and organization. ![]()
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