What to Do If Meal Planning Never Works for You
Making a meal plan is easy enough , but maintaining it is another matter entirely. Maybe you don’t have the patience to dig the recipes every week, or maybe you are just too busy. Whatever the scenario, if meal planning doesn’t suit you, here are five alternatives that don’t involve eating out.
Buy flexible ingredients
Meal planning is difficult for me to maintain, in part because I overcomplicate it. I’m looking for quirky complex recipes that can be fun when I have time to spare, but aren’t ideal for a quick meal after work. Instead of looking for specific ingredients for complex recipes, buy a few common foods that you can mix and match . Here’s how one of our readers put it :
Here are even more flexible ingredients you can choose from, especially if you’re on a budget :
- Potato
- Sweet potato
- Lentils
- Eggs
- Pepper
With this method, you need to learn a little about how to cook it in the kitchen, but if you can master some of the basics like grilled chicken , a decent salad or stir-fry , you can cook them up and mix the seasoning, marinade, or side dishes for fun.
Stick to the formula
Likewise, if you’re already in the store, a few basic nutritional formulas can help you figure out which ingredients to buy. For example, a decent multicooker has five basic elements:
- Protein (beans, tofu, meat)
- Vegetables
- Liquid like vegetable broth
- Herbs
- Flavor enhancers such as parmesan
With a formula, you don’t need a list of recipes or an app to tell you what to buy; just grab some flexible braces that fit the formula. Here are a few more dishes with simple recipes:
- Vegetable bowls : grains + greens + beans
- Stir-fry : protein + vegetables + aromas + sauce
- Pasta dinner: pasta + seasonal vegetables + meat.
It’s up to you to decide what works well together , but it gives you easy-to-follow guidance so you can shop efficiently, even without a plan.
Use someone else’s plan
Templates are the perfect meal planning tool . Pick a few recipes, list their ingredients, and then just grab your list when you go to the grocery store. Or better yet, use a template already created by someone else.
For example, Life As Mom has several ready-made meal plans that you can save or print. They include links to the recipes you need, as well as weekly shopping lists. Greatist has a ready-made shopping list when you buy one . Save or bookmark the site, open it in the store and buy what you want. When you’re ready to cook, just look at the corresponding recipes.
Just make a marinade or seasoning mixture.
Instead of planning different meals for the whole week, plan your marinade better. Prepare several different marinades, grits, or seasonings ahead of time. Then you can do the same thing every day using different marinades or seasonings, or mix and match to keep your dinner interesting. It will take much less time and you will have fewer ingredients to keep up with. You can make a decent marinade with just a few ingredients you may already have at home. Food52 reveals the formula:
Olive oil + garlic + acidic liquid (like lemon juice or vinegar) + aromatic herbs (like cilantro or basil).
To diversify the situation a little, here are a couple of recipes for universal marinades:
Depending on the marinade, you still have to buy certain foods, but fewer ingredients are required. Chances are, you can still find a simple marinade recipe for whatever you have on hand. In addition, cooking has become much easier. You don’t have to spend half a Sunday making a batch of pasta to last the whole week.
Try the food set service
If you like the idea of making a few more delicious than usual meals every week, consider subscribing to a meal kit service; they send you a box of ingredients every week with several recipes that come with them. You pay more with these plans than you would if you planned on your own, but you end up with a decent meal that you may have never tasted before for less than a restaurant. Plus they’re pretty funny.
Meal planning isn’t exactly difficult, but it’s just another routine that you need to maintain. If you don’t know how to organize meals, or simply don’t want to spend time on it every week, you can still eat at home without carefully planning each meal.
This story was originally published in December 2016 and was updated on January 19, 2021 with the latest information and adherence to the Lifehacker style guidelines.