The weekly meal plan: 10 minutes that delete a daily question

“What do I eat today?” looks like a small question until you multiply it: fourteen lunches and dinners a week, decided one by one while hungry and in a hurry, end up as takeaway orders and three improvised shopping runs. The weekly meal plan exists to answer it once.

The 10-minute method

1. Look at your week first. The menu depends on the calendar: a heavy training day asks for more; the day you get home at nine asks for a 10-minute dish or Tuesday’s leftovers. That’s why the menu belongs inside your weekly review, not apart from it.
2. Fill the fast dinners first. The problem slots are weekday nights. Solve them with your usual rotation and save creativity for the weekend.
3. Repeat dishes. Nobody needs 14 different recipes a week. A rotation of 8–10 dishes you cook well is plenty — and turns planning into placing pieces, not inventing.
4. Double servings on purpose. Tuesday’s lentils = Thursday’s lunchbox. One dish scaled to double servings is a whole dinner you don’t cook.

The shopping list: let it build itself

This is where paper gives up. Hand-copying the ingredients of seven recipes, merging duplicates (“onion” appears in four dishes: how many do I buy?) and forgetting nothing is half an hour of admin work.

It’s exactly what an app should do: in Planera, every recipe stores its ingredients with quantities; you build the week by dropping recipes in (or typing “mum’s lentils” by hand, no recipe needed) and one button merges every ingredient in the range into a shopping list — adding up duplicates and scaling quantities if you changed the servings. The list can also be shared: checks sync in real time, so if your partner grabs the onions, you see it from the next aisle.

Servings: the maths nobody wants to do

A recipe for 4 when there are 2 of you, or for 2 when you’re training for 5 — rescaling by hand, ingredient by ingredient, is why people “eyeball the amounts” and end up with half a kilo of spare rice. Scaling by servings (4 down to 2: everything halved, proportionally) should be one button, and in Planera it is — by multiplier, by servings, or from one ingredient (“I have 300 g of chicken, adjust the rest”).

Start this week

Don’t build the perfect system: save your 8 rotation dishes as recipes, plan ONLY Monday-to-Friday dinners and generate the list. Next week, add lunches. Within two Sundays, the 10 minutes of planning will be paying you back half an hour a day — and your grocery spending stops being a surprise, too.