How to turn cooking into a habit (Part 2)

Cooking requires you to plan ahead, and the more time you spend planning ahead the less frustrated you’ll be when it’s showtime.

Note: I published the first article in this ‘series’ a year ago. I wrote most of the other two parts, but, um, forgot to ever publish them. Oops. Here ya go.

I’ve tried lots of different approaches to meal planning, and I’m still trying to get better at it. Experimentation is good! Allow yourself several botched attempts at meal planning before you find your groove.

I’ll walk you through my current meal planning strategy, and you can pick and choose which pieces make sense for you.

I meal plan on Saturdays. Saturdays work for me because I don’t feel rushed, and if you wake up early enough you can have the planning and shopping done before lunch. It’s worth noting that, in my experience, not very many people do their grocery shopping early on a Saturday; this makes the entire shopping experience less frustrating to me.

Each Saturday, the first thing I do is look at my calendar. If you’re not living that digital calendar life that’s fine, but know that I am judging you for not taking advantage of a free and useful tool that will greatly simplify your life. I look at my calendar first so that I can see what my wife and I have going on that week. This helps me decide which nights are for cooking and which nights are for leftovers and which nights are for takeaway pizza. When you’re planning meals it’s important that you understand how much time you actually have, not how much time you hope you have, to prep and cook and eat. If you’re not cooking very often right now, don’t think that you’ll go from cooking one night a week to cooking four nights a week right away because you won’t.

After I’ve decided how many meals I actually need to cook, I crack open whatever recipe books I’m working through. In the last post, I talked about how I prefer cookbooks to Pinterest, but use whatever resources you have on hand. The key is to start building go-to recipes, whether it’s a collection of links or dog-eared magazines, so that you can spend less time browsing and more time doing literally anything else. Also in the last post, I mentioned that if you’re just starting out it might be best to limit yourself to recipes with a lower number of ingredients; let’s say five or fewer is a good goal. I’m not including spices and oils in this arbitrary five ingredient constraint, by the way.

I’ve started trying to cook recipes that share ingredients as well. This idea was budget-motivated; my hypothesis is that if I buy a larger quantity of a less ingredients, that’ll lower the grocery bill. TBD on if that’s going to work, but one thing is for sure: this method greatly simplifies the shopping. Here’s an example.

• Monday — Chicken + Rice + Veggies
• Tuesday — Shredded Beef Tacos + Rice + Veggies
• Wednesday — Leftover Chicken, different vegetables, maybe fry the rice for fun
• Thursday — Leftover Beef, different vegetable, maybe put it all in a bowl this time
• Friday — get dinner out, I’m tired

That meal plan took maybe twenty minutes to put together, and if I hadn’t attempted a Costco trip I would have finished the shopping in an hour. But alas, Costco.

Allow me a small tangent: I’m a big fan of the app Todoist. It has truly revolutionized the way I plan tasks for the week, and it keeps me from forgetting things. But one feature of the app that I really love is the option to set a todo as recurring. I use Todoist for grocery shopping, even though I realize that’s probably not the intended use. I regularly crush the Todoist “top 5% most productive users” each year because the robots think I’m *really* productive on Saturdays: “You average 30 completed tasks on Saturdays!” No, I just went to Kroger. I digress. The point is that I’ve set recurring todos for staple foods we buy every week. For example, my toddler drinks oat milk because she’s a hipster slash lactose intolerant so I’m going to need to buy oat milk every week. That todo is set to recur every Saturday, which means two things: one, I don’t forget to pick up more milk and two, I didn’t have to spend any time adding it to a list. If you can make a robot build your grocery list, do it.

Once the shopping is done, I usually don’t do anything else related to meal planning, prep, or cooking that day unless absolutely necessary.

Sunday is the day I look back through recipes to see if there’s anything I can prepare ahead of time. If I split up the work of each recipe, I find it easier to stay motivated to cook throughout the week.

Here’s an example: sometimes I eat salads with grilled chicken for lunch. I despise salads, but I love beer, so in order to drink all the beer I want I sometimes eat salads to offset the ever-present threat of rapid weight gain from regularly drinking the caloric equivalent of a loaf of bread. I can cook the chicken for the salads ahead of time, while doing prep for the week’s meals. Then I slice it up for the salads and portion it into microwaveable containers that I’ll toss into our very adorable lunch totes the next day.

Check the recipes to see if anything needs to be marinated, or if any veggies can be chopped ahead of time. These are small wins, but five minutes now is five minutes saved, and when you’re tired after work that five minutes matters.

Start your week knowing what you’re cooking and when you’re cooking it. You’ll be cooking more often–and more better–before you know it.