How to mealplan for the week

Start by picking the nights you cook

Look at your week first. Mark the nights you are home and want dinner, and the nights you will eat out or have leftovers.

Use the same five days each week to start. Monday to Friday is the easiest, and it is the pattern of the sample plans on this site.

Yumpot asks you the same questions: which days you cook, how long dinner may take, who you cook for and what you do not eat.

Be honest about the busy nights. A realistic plan with three cooked dinners beats a perfect plan with five that you skip. Pick the nights you will keep, and fill the rest with leftovers or a simple meal.

Plan at the same time each week

Pick one time for planning, such as Sunday evening, and keep it. A fixed time turns planning into a habit. If Sunday does not work for you, choose any evening before your first shop, and set a reminder so it does not slip.

Keep the plan visible. A note on the fridge door or a screen you open every morning works, as long as the five dinners and their days are in front of you during the week.

Choose five dinners that share fresh food

This is the step that saves the most money and time. Pick dinners that use the same fresh items, such as parsley, onion, garlic or peppers.

The easy plan is a good example. Its five dinners share 10 items, including rice, bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, parsley, garlic, potatoes and onion.

Check it yourself. Count how many dinners use each fresh item. If an item appears only once, swap that dinner for one that uses something you already buy.

Mix the cooking, too. The easy plan has one oven dish, the baked cod, and four dishes cooked in a pan, so the oven and the hob take turns.

Parsley is a good test. It is in all five dinners of the easy plan, so it is a fresh item you will use every night.

Write one shopping list

Write every ingredient from the five dinners on one list. Add the amounts for each item, check the pantry, and group the list by aisle. The step-by-step version is in the grocery list guide.

Yumpot does this in one step. Once the week is picked, the app writes the list and sorts it by aisle.

Check the list against the plan once before you shop. Count the dinners, and make sure every ingredient on the list has a day next to it. An item with no day usually means a missing dinner or a missing ingredient.

Prep on Sunday, cook on the day

Sunday prep means doing the slow jobs once. Choose the jobs that keep in the fridge until the day you cook, and leave the rest for the evening.

• Make the garlic yoghurt for the chicken shawarma bowl. Grate the garlic into the yoghurt with a pinch of salt and keep it covered in the fridge.
• Make the salsa for the beef tacos. Chop the tomatoes and half the onion, then mix them with lime juice and salt.
• Rinse the chickpeas and the black beans and drain the tins. Dice the onion and peppers for the first dinners of the week.

Keep raw meat and fish covered and cold until you cook it, and do not prep more than the week needs. Prep saves time, but the cooking itself still takes 25 to 40 minutes for the dinners in the easy plan.

Use leftovers on purpose

Leftovers work best when you plan them. Cook a larger batch on one night, and eat the extra on a night when you have no time to cook.

Stews and sauces are the easiest to double. The pork and pepper goulash and the beef bolognese are two examples on this site.

For a bigger batch, set the household to four people. The app doubles each amount, so the shopping list covers the extra portion. The family plan is already built for four.

When you finish a dinner, mark it as cooked. The list stops asking you to buy for it.

Label each container with the dish and the day you cooked it. A label takes a few seconds, and it stops the mystery container at the back of the fridge.

When a plan falls apart

Plans break. A friend invites you out, a dinner takes longer than planned, or you simply do not feel like it. Move the dinner to a free night, or swap it for a faster one from the same week.

Use the food that will go off first. If the fresh items for Thursday are about to turn, cook the Thursday dinner earlier and move the Monday one later in the week, as long as its fresh food keeps.

More guides

• Free meal planning apps: what you get and where they stop
• Best meal planning apps compared
• Mealime alternatives, and what to do with your recipes
• Grocery list for the week, built from a dinner plan
• Meal planning for beginners