How to plan a week of meals with one shopping list

Planning a week takes about ten minutes once you know the steps. Choose a few recipes, decide which days you will eat them, and turn them into one shopping list. The week planner on this site does the adding up for you.

How many recipes should you plan?

Three or four. One breakfast, one or two lunches and one or two dinners cover Monday to Thursday, and Friday is often leftovers or a meal out. More recipes mean more shopping and more cooking time, which is where most people give up. The reasoning is in three recipes, one shopping list.

How do you choose recipes that work together?

• Look for shared ingredients: one bag of rice, one tub of yogurt, one bunch of green onions used across several dishes.
• Mix one freezer-friendly dish with fresh ones, so you can freeze the extra servings.
• Include one dish that needs no reheating if you have no microwave at work.
• Check the fridge life on each recipe. Put the ones that keep three days at the start of the week.

If you are not sure what to cook, the recipe generator ranks recipes by what is already in your kitchen.

How does the planner work?

Each day has a breakfast, lunch and dinner slot. Add a recipe to every slot you want to cover. The planner counts how many servings you need, works out how many batches that is, and adds the ingredients of every recipe into one shopping list. Two recipes that both use an onion show one line for two onions. You can tick items off as you shop.

Without an account, the plan stays in your browser on this device. With an account, it follows you to your phone.

Is there a quick way to start?

Yes. The home page has a starter week: overnight oats, black bean soup and garlic chicken and rice bowls, four days each. Load it into the planner and change one recipe at a time. The cooking order is in how to meal prep a week in one afternoon.

How do you avoid waste?

Plan only the days you will really eat at home. Buy herbs and salad for the first half of the week and frozen vegetables for the second. Anything you will not eat by day four goes in the freezer on day two, not day five. How to use up leftover ingredients covers the bits left over.

What should you do at the end of the week?

Note what you did not finish and plan one fewer serving of it next week. Keep the recipes that worked. After a month you will have a rotation of favourites, and planning takes five minutes. When you get bored, see meal prep ideas for when you are bored.