Meal planning can make your life much easier, but it can feel overwhelming to start, especially if you’re not used to cooking.
So let me help you get where you want to be: in a reality where you eat food you’ve made yourself, with quality ingredients, and where you don’t have to spend an hour every day deciding what you’re gonna eat.
Grab a pen, a notebook and let’s tackle this together.
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1. List the recipes you’re already familiar with
Do you already cook regularly? Do you have favorite recipes?
If you already enjoy cooking, you likely have some recipes that you often return to. Make a list out of them and jump to this section (#3). But you can still read #2 if you’re feeling stuck.
2. Just do it
If you don’t cook yet, meal planning can feel overwhelming because you don’t know what to choose or what you need. I’ve been there too so let me help you here. The secret is just to get started.
Start cooking easy and quick recipes. Once you get the hang of it, you can add more variety. And then, you will see a pattern emerge. You will be able to determine what type of recipes you like cooking, what you enjoy eating, what day of the week your energy is lower, if you can cook once or twice a day, how big your portions are, etc.
The thing is, when it comes to meal planning, there is no one size fits all. So I will not be giving you a sample week with recipes. Instead, I will teach you how to craft your own meal plans from scratch, even if you’ve never made that, and even if you’ve never cooked.
3. Source your recipes
Why it’s important
At the beginning of my meal-planning journey (lol that sounds so corny), I didn’t have a dedicated source for my recipes. I lost so much time scouring the internet trying to find recipes. My Pinterest results usually brought me the same recipes over and over. I found appetizing food in YouTube Shorts, but creators often don’t give quantities or detailed instructions.
Finding good recipes was hard. But it all changed when I decided to use the app my mother had been using for a while, Jow. I loooove this app, even if in the Philippines I’m not able to use it to its full potential. Let me give you a small tour.
The best meal planning tool ever
This app helps you discover tried-and-true recipes and adds them to your weekly menu.
You can enter your settings: how many people you feed, what cooking appliances you have, or any foods you don’t eat. Then you can easily search recipes by categories. And there are so many of them: ingredients, cooking time, seasonal foods, budget-friendly, healthier options, vegetarian or vegan options.
As you save the recipes to your weekly menu, the app builds your grocery list for the week and accounts for the right quantities of each product. But wait, there’s more.
When you’re done building your meal plan (dessert and snack recipes are also available), you can check your grocery list, adjust the quantities, add other products, and then THE APP WILL ORDER IT FOR YOU IN A SUPERMARKET OF YOUR CHOICE. So basically, you only have to show up at the drive-in and get the groceries the app has ordered for you. HOW SIMPLE IS THAT?? But WAIT. There’s MORE.
You can save the recipes you’ve liked as favorites to find them easily. The app saves all the weekly plans you’ve validated so you can go back and reuse them. But wait. There’s more.
There is a comment section and a user rating system on all the recipes. So you can see what the people have to say about it. And usually, they have helpful comments, like some tweaks they’ve made to make it even more tasteful. But WAIT. There’s EVEN MORE. When a tip comes back often in the comments, the app creators will listen to their users and UPDATE THE RECIPE based on their observations. But waiiiiiiit. You can also add your personal notes to the recipes. I find this so useful because here in the Philippines I don’t have access to all the typically French/European ingredients so I’m often using substitutes. This function allows me to track what I’ve used and how much. BUT WAIT, I’m not done.
Are you someone who hates reading and prefers to watch and learn? Well, I have good news for you. On top of having (very clear, by the way) written instructions, most of the recipes on the app include video steps. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE.
Let me tell you about what you can find on the recipe cards. The cooking time is broken down into 2 parts: preparation and actual using-fire type of cooking. You can also change the number of people and the quantities will adjust automatically. By the way, the number of people is not set for the entire week. If you usually cook for 3 people, but you plan on hosting 2 more for one day, the app allows you to set different people numbers on different recipes in the same week. And the grocery list updates itself.
In the recipe card, you can also find a difficulty level indicator, the number of calories per portion + the different nutritional values broken down (super useful for those following a diet), the Nutriscore (a European indicator of how healthy is the recipe), the Ecoscore (an indicator of the environmental impact), the price per portion and a share button. Bonus: when you share a recipe with someone who doesn’t have the app, they can still open it because Jow is also a website. The app is available for Android AND iPhone. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE.
The app has a referral program. You can invite your non-Jow-using friends and they get 15 euros on their first order of +50 euros, you get 10 euros for their first order, and 5 euros for their second one.
Jump start your meal planning game
Okay. I think you get it now. I absolutely adore Jow because it’s life-saving, time-saving, money-saving, effort-saving, brain power-saving. What are you waiting for? Try it for yourself. By the way, did I mention this app is totally free? Unless you’re ordering your groceries through it, obviously.
Here’s the link for the people living in the US.
And here is the link for the people living in France.
If you live in any other country, you won’t be able to order your groceries in the app. You can still use it as a meal-planning tool though. That’s what I’m currently doing.
4. Make a list of your pantry essentials
This will facilitate your grocery listing. When you start your meal planning for the next week, check all your essentials and add them to your list if some are about to run out.
Again, pantry staples are gonna look different for everybody depending where they are in their life.
If you’ve been cooking, you know which ingredients you tend to use all the time. But I can safely say that the one pantry essential everyone is gonna need is salt. Just buy some salt and a practical dispenser.
I made a pretty planner to help you sort this out. Get it for free here by subscribing to my newsletter.
5. Determine some basic meal parameters
How many people are you cooking for? How many meals do you want to plan per week or day? Are there days when you have less time to cook? Are there meals you plan to eat outside? Do you need lunchbox meals, and if yes, how many and on what days? Is there a special event that week for which you need to cook something in particular? Will you attend events where food is already included?
Write down the permanent parameters for each day (or meal, if you’re planning several meals per day). Then, if you have special temporary parameters (like going to a party or hosting a girl’s night), write them down too.
You can use my pretty planner for this step too. Hehe, how convenient 🙃
6. Additional tips
Take some time to lay out your meal planning foundation. Once this is done, you won’t have to do this work all over again, and the process will become smoother with experience.
Keep a record of your meal plans so you can repeat them. For example, if you have 8 weekly meal plans, you have a period of two months covered that you can reuse throughout the year.
You can leave a meal blank to eat the week’s leftovers. Food waste is ugly.
Each week, try to buy more of your essentials than you need to stock up on them. It’s nice to have a stock in case something happens. Your grocery day might be postponed (that happened to me sooo many times because our grocery day is Sunday), a storm might come or you might get sick and won’t be able to leave your house for a few days. Or, you could have last-minute guests. You can check this post to know what to do in this situation. To better face those situations, stock up on non-perishable items.
Don’t forget to give a try to Jow (for USA) (for France), my favorite meal plan helper.
Okay, I hope meal planning now feels less daunting to you and that you have a better overview of what you’re gonna need. Remember, the secret is to start.
Please feel free to reach out to me in the comments or by mail if you have more questions.
