Without getting into every nook and cranny of effective meal planning, here’s a simple, basic, and flexible plan that my family have come back to time and again to help us plan healthy, enjoyable meals.

Step Zero: Write it down. Write down your plan, your grocery lists, your recipes, and keep it handy to refer to. Don’t force yourself to try to remember everything.

Step One:

Choose your breakfast for the week. - For us this is either overnight oatmeal or smoothies.

Step Two:

Use this alliterative device to plan out meals

  • Meatless Monday
  • Taco Tuesday
  • Wildcard Wednesday
  • Stir Fry Thursday
  • (Frozen) Pizza Friday
  • Slow Cooker Saturday
  • Sunday Spaghetti

This is not meant to be literal. When I say “Taco” I really mean “Latin flavors”. And when I say “Spaghetti” I mean both Italian flavors and also, what we have available. Stir Fry tends to mean Asian flavors, but doesn’t have to. Wednesdays used to be the evening that was easiest to really cook, so I’d usually try new recipes then. I like to buy “audibles” like Frozen Pizza for those days when life gets in the way of actual cooking, and I like to try to “pair” things like slow cooking meat on saturday for either the Sunday gravy or the “Tacos” on Tuesday. It’s also not a coincidence that the Tacos come after Meatless Monday, which more often than not is Black Beans and Rice. Just make a little more meat on the weekend (easy to do with a cheap cut), and a little more black beans, and all you really have to do is put the tacos together.

Our current situation is somewhat unique in that my wife’s lunch hour is part of her graduate program. Most days I’ll just eat what I made for dinner last night for lunch the following day.

One additional tip - when you do assign recipes to nights, pay attention to the protein and grain choices. You don’t want to essentially have three different chicken pastas in successive nights - which you can easily end up doing. It helps to limit yourself to only setting a menu 3-5 nights out (see step 5).

Step Three:

Shop your Pantry first! This helps you to avoid having too much of the stuff you don’t eat just sitting there and lets you know when you’re running low on the stuff you do need.

Step Four:

Protect your Mise! A Mise (short for mise en place, pronounced meez) is your work station in a kitchen. The better you treat it, the better it will treat you. At a bare minimum it means keeping an area clean and ready to use. Beyond that it means having all of the things ready to use: your board clean and clear and steadied, your knives sharp and ready, containers for prepped foods clean and available, and all of the ingredients for the meal you’re about to make present and accounted for.

Good cooks are prepared (and great ones are frequently more than a little obsessive compulsive). Other than “Write it down”, the best advice I could give to a home cook is to make your mise a sacred space.

Step Five:

Shop as often as you’re able. Lots of advantages to going multiple times a week - first, smaller grocery bills. Second, fresher produce with less guilt about it going bad. Third - you get really good at things you practice more frequently. Fourth - its way easier to carry two bags of groceries than ten. Last, you actually have the ability to ‘chase the food’ as my mother in law Kay would say. You not only learn who has what when, you learn how to choose the right ingredients for what you want to cook, and this is when the magic of home cooking tends to happen. You’re out, shopping, leisurely because you know you have food at home and this is just prep. Then you see it - a great deal on your favorite fish or a display of inseason vegetables and you’re off to the races. Your plan adapts to the conditions of the day, and you’re prepared to take advantage of it.

Step Six:

No plan survives contact with the enemy. The enemy is the chaos of life. You can’t predict it, you can’t control it, you can only anticipate its’ inevitablity. There will be nights where you have a lot of leftover produce. There will be nights when you don’t want to cook. There will be nights where you just want to go to that one Mexican restraunt because you’re craving their Mole Chicken, or more shamefully, because you just like The Cheesecake Factory, dammit. There will be nights when you order $50 of Chinese delivery.

All of these are fine by me. And no one should make you feel bad about it. My best solutions are to build in a variety of flavors throughout the week (so I don’t get bored), to force myself to get no brainer meals (like frozen pizzas), and to have things like eggs, rice, boxed macaroni and cheese, and frozen veggies that can be readily assembled in to unplanned deliciousness. These are my hedge bets and I’ll remind you that there’s never a bad time for breakfast.