Dinner Thoughts: A Meal Planning Newsletter
A how-to guide and a falafel feast.
Welcome! I’m Megan Scott, co-author of the 2019 Joy of Cooking, and this is Dinner Thoughts, an often-as-I-can-manage-it newsletter about meal planning. In it, I share my weekly meal plans and thoughts about how to cook sustainably. Read on for specific guidance and tips, galaxy-brained thoughts about intuitive cooking, and literal meal plans that mirror how my household eats every week.
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After a long hiatus1 I am back in the meal planning universe. John and I did the by-the-seat-of-our-pants meal strategy for a long while. You’re probably familiar—around 4 p.m. one of the members of your household says, “Dinner thoughts?” and you sob silently inside because not only can you not name a single recipe that you are capable of making, but nothing even sounds good and the prospect of figuring it all out makes you tired. Yes?
I like to think that I’m such a fantastic improvisational cook that I don’t need a meal plan. And while I can cobble together a meal out of almost anything, that doesn’t mean it will be interesting or good or easy or even advisable. It’s one thing to make a weird, hodgepodge-y dinner the night before a week-long vacation and quite another to live life that way.
I’ve been thinking about a conversation John and I had with artist Anna Brones on a recent episode of our podcast (maybe my favorite episode to date) about how putting up guardrails can aid the creative process. That’s exactly how I approach meal planning. I don’t sit down and just…think up things I want to eat (although if I have a very strong craving for a particular thing, I do add that to the plan!). I put up my guardrails first, and suddenly the number of things I can make for dinner in a given week is gloriously finite.
I’m going to start sharing my meal plans again with you as I’m able to manage it, because it’s easier to show than to tell (see below), but read on for a description of my process, which is mostly haphazard and completely open to experimentation.
The big caveat here is that this approach may not work for you! I have 15 years of experience cooking professionally, and this is a method I’ve found to work really well, but even so, you may not jive with it and that is OK. Also, while I do have a day job, I do not have children. If you do and find meal planning really awful or hard, I hear that—I’m not going to sit here and tell you to be happy about it. I hope you can find something useful to take away, even if it’s not the whole package.
The Grand Fridge Tour
I start by taking myself on a tour of my fridge, freezer, and pantry. If I notice that something has been there a little (or a lot) too long, I add it to my list. The items that I really need to use are important to add, but that’s just the start. I add what I’ve got, no matter how fresh or…wizened it may be. A meal plan can be used in this way to prevent food waste, but it’s also an exercise in gratitude for what I have.
I try not to dwell on my selections too much. Beyond things I just need to use up, I jot down items that are interesting to me in the moment without a lot of judgment. I also keep my list tight—adding everything in my pantry and fridge makes meal planning just as overwhelming as deciding, from scratch, what I want to eat every day at 4 p.m.
If I’m feeling energetic, my fridge-freezer-pantry tour is also the perfect time to tidy up a little. I’ll take produce out of crisper drawers, toss anything too shriveled or slimy to save, get a good look at the leftovers situation—maybe one meal can be entirely composed of leftovers—and quickly wipe up spills. It’s not a deep clean, but it keeps things from getting too gnarly.
Similarly, I’ll rummage around the freezer and pantry for about five minutes, stashing items in places better suited to their size and shape and kind than when I threw everything carelessly in after getting back from a grocery shopping trip.
By now, I have a list of items and a pretty good idea of the other ingredients I have on hand (another benefit of this process: I don’t accidentally buy things I already have). It’s time to get into it. I sit down and think about how to put the items on my list together. Remember: I didn’t try to pre-plan anything. I wrote down ingredients without judging, based solely on vibes.
This is the part where you’re going to want to walk away and heat up a frozen pizza. Don’t do it! You have a bottomless well of creativity in you!
Or, I don’t know, frozen pizza is also fine! Maybe serve it with a big salad for vitamins?
How To Trick Yourself Into Being Creative
Sometimes the ingredients make sense together, and I immediately have good ideas, but that’s not the norm. It usually takes me 10 minutes or so to jog my creativity, and I have a couple of tricks to help the process.
If I’m not in a rush, I pull a few cookbooks from the shelves and thumb through the indexes, scanning for recipes that use the ingredients I have. Often, that exercise will yield a couple of ideas, but I almost never end up making a recipe verbatim. The recipe is just the idea, and I mold it around what I have on hand.
Another helpful exercise is taking one ingredient—say, cabbage—and listing every way I’ve cooked or eaten cabbage that I liked. Here’s a partial list:
Slaw (mayo or not)
Vegetable soup
Izakaya cabbage salad
Minestrone
Vietnamese chicken salad
Cut into wedges and seared with a yogurt sauce
Cabbage rolls
Haluski
The idea is that one of the dishes I list will mesh with something else and suddenly I’ve figured out dinner. I keep going in this way, with the different ingredients I jotted down earlier, until I have at least a few dinner ideas.
I also glance at my schedule for the coming week. On a busy day, I’ll want something easy to make. When I have no plans, I can spend extra time cooking something really nice. Some nights, I build in a takeout or freezer meal option (we keep Trader Joe’s teriyaki chicken and kung pao chicken on hand at all times for emergencies) because I want to be realistic.
This is how, in 30 minutes or less, I go from no idea what to cook in a week to a fully formed plan and a short grocery list of items I need to round out my meal plan. So that’s half an hour of planning to avoid that dreaded 4 p.m. “dinner thoughts” void and a number of soul-sucking last-minute grocery store trips.
My goal in meal planning isn’t to avoid shopping entirely, but it does cut down on the groceries I buy, and it really cuts down on the number of trips I make to the store per week, all of which contributes to a feeling of calm and empowerment around dinnertime.
As always, your mileage may vary. Maybe you super duper hate meal planning and bask in chaos—know yourself! Do what works best for you! But if you habitually struggle over what to cook, find yourself in the fluorescent lights of the supermarket several times a week, or waste a lot of food (don’t beat yourself up—it happens), it’s worth giving meal planning a shot.
Let me know in the comments how you decide what to make every week and what parts of my meal planning strategy sound the most appealing (or the hardest!).
This Week’s Meal Plan
Notes:
Proteins are listed under “freezer” because we keep a variety of proteins on hand rather than buying them fresh most of the time. You could absolutely make proteins its own column if that’s very important to you.
I put little checkmarks by items once I’ve incorporated them into a meal. Notice that I don’t use everything on my list.
This week is unusual because I have a couple of obligations that will take me away from home at dinnertime. Thus the “John solo” notes on Wednesday and Friday.
Thursday’s meal doesn’t have a starring protein, but I figure we can decide later in the week how to proceed—maybe we grab a block of tofu and add Andrea Nguyen’s soy sauce-seared tofu or we can thaw a pack of chicken thighs and roast them alongside the veggies. You don’t have to have 100 percent of your meal plan figured out. Think of it as scaffolding.
I won’t get into it here other than to say that I have a day job that doesn’t always leave me with a lot of creative juices left for writing this newsletter.
Very interesting. It's always a balance between what I *want* to make and what I *can* make haha. Energywise, timewise, pantrywise.
I think I always start with the produce in the fridge and build around that. Because it's usually the most perishable and also bc it's the best way I've found to plan vegetable-forward meals.
Beyond that, I try to incorporate one new recipe a week -- or every week or so. Without this notion, we would probably eat the same 7 meals until the end of time. Not terrible, but not what I aspire to either. And trying to do that also means some of those recipes -- or versions of them -- end up in the rotation of regular recipes.
Also: fascinating to see your meal plan and holy crap that all sounds good!