The Lazy Cook’s Cheat-sheet: How I Moved Away From Meal Planning

Now, if you’re not a recipe blogger this may not be a big deal for you. Even for a recipe blogger, this wasn’t a big deal for me. But I have found (after 3.5 minutes of googling) that almost every home-cook in the recipe blog world belong to one of two camps.

First: the Meal-Planners.
These are the people who take the time to write down every last thing they plan to eat and buy accordingly (thus saving money and time). I used to do this. Used to. Why don’t I anymore? Well, there’s this thing called can’t-be-bothered. You may or may not have seen it on this blog before. So, gradually I became part of…

The Day-by-Days.
These people (assume, sometimes) they know what their family wants to eat, that they have everything they need in the freezer, and that they will try no new recipes requiring exotic ingredients. Guilty as charged. It’s basically the Meal-planner backwards. They start with what they have in the freezer and find recipes that they can make with it.

Boring bit: I used to be a meal-plan freak. Friday nights would find me curled up at the coffee table, muttering to myself about chicken thighs and texting my friend that I would reply her later as I just had to get this down first.

Any day that I didn’t plan a meal for would find me frantic in the kitchen, flipping through recipe books. But as family schedules began to change more often and unexpectedly, planning didn’t work so well anymore. So bit by bit, I built up a non-exhaustive list of the meals and dishes that I used frequently. Eventually, I came up with this:

The Part You Actually Came To See: The Cheat-sheet.

• How To Use It: this is a no-brainer but I added this in because I like lists. The simple steps to using a cheat-sheet:

1. Know what you have in the freezer/fridge.
2. Pick a meal off the chart that you can make with what you have.

After several months of cooking, I figured out the amount of meat and vegetables I use in an average week. Marketing and grocery shopping lists then become pretty standard (I deviate slightly when I have a specific dish I want to cook). Once you have that figured out, you won’t be needing to buy much extras, unless of course you’re trying something new and exotic.

• How To Make Your Own Cheat-sheet: List down all of your favourite (and your family’s favourites too, don’t be selfish) recipes in a chart. That simple.

You know best what your family likes, as well as the sort of recipes you can and cannot make. For example, I stay away from deep-fried dishes, porridge, and anything with Brussels sprouts.

The only drawback to cheat-sheets is right here: you probably have to be cooking for a while before you can list down the tried-and-true recipes 1) that work, and 2) that your family will eat. BUT, once you have that, it’ll save you much time. And the best thing is that your list will keep growing and expanding as you try out new things.

I printed all the recipe ideas I could think of in a table in Word Document and left plenty of space to add more. How you divide it is really up to you. I used two main headings: Lunch and Dinner. Dinners tend to be more multifarious so I had subheadings there as well.

Yes, we do eat a lot of Asian food for dinner. If you don’t know what giam chai is, you’re missing out in life.

Oh wait, there’s another drawback. Said family members may also start to fill up the spaces with food they want to eat. (That may or may not be a drawback, depending on how kind your family is.)

Disclaimer: If you are a meal-planner, chances are, this won’t work for you, because it doesn’t save you extra money, and you still have to choose what to cook each day.

But if you’re one of those people whose schedules change often and you need to be flexible, this will work. So go on, make your own cheat-sheets!