I’ve never meal-prepped. I just can’t get into it. Watch endless Instagram reels of other people meal prepping for the week? Sign me up. Do it myself? No thank you. I just don’t have the discipline to spend a whole day cooking. What I do instead is spend a bit of time meal planning for the week ahead so that I have a solid plan that we can simply execute before descending into increasingly desperate echoes of “what do you feel like eating”. Every week, usually at the end of the week when new grocery flyers drop (I know, could my life get any more exciting?), I come up with at least five meals to get us from Monday to Friday, and I build my grocery list around that menu. Armed with this knowledge, my trips to the grocery store become less chaotic, as well. I know what I’m looking for–we can get in and get out.
What Makes a Meal?
So, what qualifies something as a meal? In my household, a balanced meal consists of one protein (my husband would like a meat protein, though he has definitely come around on tofu and beans as viable alternatives), one carb (such as rice, pasta, or potatoes), and at least one vegetable (I would like it to be green; bonus points if it’s leafy). Sometimes, this can be achieved by a one-pot wonder recipe, such as my Minestrone soup. Other times, it requires a few separate components: a pot of spaghetti with meat sauce, plus a side salad; or curry tofu served over white rice, plus a stir-fried veg. My weekly meal plan includes only balanced meals that should satisfy my household.
The Meal Planning System
By definition, a system is a set of components that work together to achieve some purpose. The purpose that my meal planning system sets out to achieve is as follows:
- Get my family satisfactorily fed throughout the work week
- Minimize the number of different individual ingredients purchased
- Maximize the use of purchased ingredients (therefore minimizing waste)
- Maximize kitchen efficiency (less active time, fewer pots and pans dirtied, etc)
I achieve the second and third criteria using a system that I think of as anchor meals and gap meals.
Anchor Meals
Anchor meals are going to be the ones that demand the most in terms of ingredients. These meals are going to drive the majority of the decisions about which items you add to your grocery list. These are the meals that you (or your family) have been craving, and you are going to make them this week, so coming up with these meals is how I begin meal planning.
Choose between one and three anchor meals to start. To be honest, unless I’m really craving something in particular or my husband makes a particular request, my anchors are usually determined by the protein that’s on sale that week, as meat and fish normally contribute the most to the grocery bill.
Gap Meals
Gap meals, on the other hand, are not too opinionated. They are how my meal planning system really comes together. They are designed, shockingly, to fill in the gaps between your anchor meals and to use up the ingredients left over from cooking those anchor recipes (alas, you cannot buy half a zucchini). Imagine the chaos of choosing five independent recipes that all call for different ingredients with no overlap: the money you’d spend on groceries, your fridge overflowing with produce steadily dissolving into murky puddles at the back of your crisper. Gap meals are how you make the most of the ingredients you already have (a process made easier if you think in terms of formula cooking rather than recipe cooking).
The rules are not hard and fast. While gap meals are meant to maximize the efficiency of your grocery list, their existence does not preclude you from picking up ingredients specifically for a gap meal. They merely represent a way of thinking about what you already have, both on the grocery list and in your pantry and freezer.
Here’s how it works.
A Real Life Meal Plan
A few days ago, my husband remarked that with the weather turning, he was in the mood for chilli, and because I am a loving and attentive spouse, I add chilli to the menu for the week. Ground beef is not on sale anywhere, but luckily, I have a pound in the freezer from when it was on sale last week. Incidentally, ground pork is on sale this week, but only if you buy a family-size pack, which is more than I need for my 1-1 beef and pork chilli. I’ll have to come up with another use for the pork.
With chilli firmly on the menu, I start looking at the upcoming flyers for the grocery stores we normally visit, and I see that salmon fillets are on sale. Miso salmon is a household favourite, and I’m in the midst of tweaking that particular recipe, so salmon being on sale is opportune. I normally serve salmon with a fresh salad over a bed of rice, so I’ll need to pick up a pack of spring mix, and since I normally use half the pack of salad mix for the salmon bowl, the other half can into a side salad for chilli (remember, I have a need for greens).
The chilli and the salmon bowl are my primary anchor meals. I also happened to notice that Brussels Sprouts are on sale. I hate Brussels Sprouts, but my husband likes them and I’m trying to find a way to cook them so that I will like them, so they go on the list. Ironically, Brussels Sprouts became a third anchor meal. Here’s how the rest of the plan came together in a convenient matrix to show you the utilization of the ingredients I’ll have to buy.
| Ground pork | Salmon | Salad Mix | Cucumber | Broccoli | Brussels Sprouts | Tofu | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chilli w/ bread & side salad | x | x | |||||
| Miso salmon & wild rice bowls | x | x | x | ||||
| Seared scallops w/ pan-roasted Brussels sprouts & bacon served over polenta | x | ||||||
| Zhajiangmian (Chinese noodles w/ meat sauce) w/ steamed broccoli on the side | x | x | x | ||||
| Fried tofu in spicy bean sauce w/ stir-fried broccoli over rice | x | x |
Recall that I have a pound of ground beef in the freezer. I also have a pack of frozen scallops that I picked up when it was on sale a couple weeks ago, and we have a pack of bacon in the freezer that really should be used up (pretty sure this was part of a multi-pack from Costco). In fact, since I won’t use the entire pack of bacon in one meal, I open up the possibility of making some pancakes and having breakfast for dinner–a good option to keep in the back pocket. Apart from that, I always keep rice, dried noodles, and corn meal in the pantry, so I won’t have to pick up any of those. My grocery list for the week looks something like this:
- Ground pork* (family pack)
- Salmon fillet*
- Salad mix (142g pack)
- Mini cucumbers (6 pack)
- Broccoli*
- Brussels Sprouts*
- Tofu (227g pack)
- Scallions
- Fresh bread
- Canned tomatoes
- Canned beans
* item is on sale this week!
Additional Considerations
In addition to maximizing the efficiency of my groceries, I aim to include a variety of proteins, vegetables, and starches when working on meal planning for the week. Admittedly, the diversity of produce tends to increase in the summer, simply due to seasonal availability, but throughout the year, we try to maintain a rotation of rice, noodles, potatoes, and other carbs. I grew up eating white rice with every meal, and I imagine my husband was raised on a diet of potatoes. As adults, we both enjoy variety.
Note, I try to create such a meal plan every week (past weeks that lacked a plan have been utter chaos), but I do not ever create an ingredient matrix. That was done purely to demonstrate the intentional overlap of ingredients when coming up with meal ideas.