Start with the calendar
Plans fail because they are written for an imaginary week. Before you choose a single dish, look at the real one: the late meeting on Tuesday, the practice that runs until seven, the dinner out on Friday. Give the busy nights the fastest meals or the leftovers, and save anything that takes more than forty-five minutes for a night when you will be home by six. The whole exercise takes about fifteen minutes, and it works best at the same time each week, just before you shop.
Look in the fridge first
Open the refrigerator and the freezer before you open a cookbook. The half bag of carrots, the chicken thighs frozen three weeks ago and the open jar of curry paste are the start of the plan, not an afterthought. Build one or two meals around what is already there, then fill in the rest.
Order the meals by how long the ingredients last. Fish, ground meat, tender greens and fresh herbs go early in the week. Hardy vegetables such as cabbage, carrots and squash, along with anything from the freezer or the pantry, can wait until Thursday.
Keep a rotation
Nobody needs fifty-two new ideas a year. Write down the ten or twelve dinners your household already likes and knows how to cook, and draw most of each week from that list. Add no more than one new recipe a week, on a night with time to spare. Loose categories help on a blank page: a pasta night, a soup or stew, something on a sheet pan, something with rice, a breakfast-for-dinner. Save each week's plan when it is done. After two months you will have a stack of finished plans that can be reused whole.
Build in the escape hatch
- Write the plan as a list of meals rather than a schedule, so you can swap Tuesday for Wednesday without guilt.
- Keep one pantry meal in reserve that needs no fresh ingredients, such as pasta with canned tomatoes and garlic or eggs with rice.
- Turn the plan into the shopping list at once, grouped by section of the store, with quantities.
- Post the plan on the refrigerator door where everyone can read it, which also ends the nightly negotiation.
Note If the plan falls apart by Wednesday, the plan was too ambitious, not you. Cut it to three cooked meals next week and build back up.
