One shopping list, a week of dinners

Planning meals fails when every night is a separate decision with a separate list. Overlap is the whole trick.

The reason midweek cooking collapses is not time. It is that seven dinners chosen independently need seven sets of ingredients, and half of them go off before their night arrives.

Choose them together instead and let them share. A bunch of coriander bought for one dish is waste; bought for three it is a staple. Half a tin of chipotle is a problem on Monday and an asset on Wednesday. Start from the perishable things and ask what else could use them.

Then stagger by effort rather than by type. One night that takes an hour and makes enough for two meals, two nights that take twenty minutes, one night that is assembly rather than cooking. A week made entirely of thirty-minute meals is a week you will abandon on Thursday.

Cook the fragile things first. Fish and salad leaves early in the week, roots and pulses later, because they will still be fine on Friday when the spinach would not.

The planner here does the arithmetic: put the meals on the days and the shopping list comes out combined, with the quantities added up rather than repeated.

Photograph: lauren — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons