Meal planning for one around a full-time schedule
So you work 9 to 5, are a full time student, or on an otherwise full-time schedule. Maybe you are living on your own for the first time and don’t know where to start when it comes to cooking for yourself. Maybe you have no experience cooking at all (this was my position when I began living on my own 3 years ago). Maybe you’ve been on your own for a while, but you’re tired of rotating through the same 3 boring meals and spending so much of your monthly budget on takeout meals that are not energizing you optimally. Whether you love or hate your schedule, you’ve gotta eat, and this daily demand can be overwhelming.
A year and a half ago, I transitioned from a restaurant job to an office job, and this presented two immediate, large challenges. The first challenge was no longer being able to cook my meals on shift, as I no longer enjoyed the convenience of working in a kitchen. The second was that the workday now ended much later for me — 5PM instead of 2 or 3PM at the latest. While I loved to cook and had gained plenty of experience by the time I transitioned to a new workplace, I still found myself ordering Panera from work frequently — sometimes once per week. This would add up to $80 per month for a weekly Panera meal alone.
As a recipe developer and strategic business owner, I am proud to say I hardly ever eat a restaurant meal these days, as I now cook up to 5 days per week. However, before I decided to launch a blog, I found myself steadily reducing my cost on takeout. One day at work, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I ordered food from the office. For three months, I had brought my own home cooked leftovers daily — that’s 60 meals!
Reducing your costs and increasing the amount of home cooked meals you eat does not entail breaking your back, cooking 5 days per week, and struggling every single week to make a plan. All it requires is a consistent and simple strategy — one that requires the least amount of thought and effort possible. It took between several months and a year for me to really nail down a strategy I knew I could stick to. When I finally figured it out, I found myself eating more home cooked meals, and expending so much less energy than I did when I winged-it each week and relied heavily on takeout.
If you are overwhelmed, as I once was, by the prospect of providing all your own food, fear not — here are some key steps you can take to save money, feel better, and live your life free of the relentless pressure that comes with meal planning and cooking.
Get meal planning out of the way first thing on your day off
If you can, I would recommend picking one day of the week which you have off consistently, and putting meal planning first thing on your schedule.
Even I, someone who has a passion for cooking, find the planning to be my least favorite part of the process in getting food to the table. Setting not just a specific day but specific time (ideally, the morning) to plan out your meals and write a list of what you need is step one to reduce the tax of the planning demand on yourself. You know exactly when you will plan your food for the week, and for the rest of the time (and the rest of that day), you can focus on enjoying your life!
I would strongly recommend ordering online from your local grocery store, and selecting a time to pick up the groceries that works well for you, instead of shopping in person. This has become extremely convenient amid the pandemic, but I honestly cannot believe I was not doing this before. I have a mobile app for my local grocery store, and I can knock out the planning and the shopping within a half hour from the comfort of my own home. That saves me 30 minutes of commuting time, and up to an hour of in person shopping time. Uh, hell yeah.
I would suggest planning in the morning, and scheduling yourself to pick up the groceries that same evening. The cooking then can begin the next day, because let’s face it — planning, shopping, and cooking the same day does not sound particularly enticing to anyone.
Wondering how to approach the planning process? That leads me to my next several points, the first of which being:
Plan out 3 meals, and 3 (ideally consecutive) nights to cook them
Through trial and error, I found that planning two meals is not enough, and planning four is usually too many. This leads to the perfect number of meals — three!
The amount of servings here is important. If the 3 meals are meant to provide you with lunch and dinner throughout the week, you will need 14 servings. I find that looking for meals that will provide 4 servings is plenty, even though it will leave you with a shortage of 2 servings. Typically after a week of cooking, especially if you are cooking for just yourself, you will find yourself with a surplus of ingredients to use up. A little experimentation and practice will help you turn these extra ingredients, along with staples you have on hand, into your remaining two meals.
I enjoy cooking my dinners on 3 consecutive days, as that leaves me with some options to choose from throughout the week. My strategy is cooking and eating meal #1 for dinner on Sunday, then for lunch on Monday. Monday night, I cook meal #2. Then for Tuesday’s lunch, I can choose between the third serving of meal #1 or the second serving of meal #2. Tuesday evening, I cook meal #3. You get the idea — leftovers are crucial if you do not want to cook every day of the week, and by cooking 3 consecutive days, you are offering yourself some choices throughout the week instead of eating the same meal back-to-back-to-back until you need to make something new. Cooking 3 consecutive days also means that for the rest of the week, you just get to chillax as you did all the work on the front end of the week.
Do you find yourself blankly staring into Google, having no idea what you want to eat and much less what kinds of plant-based meals taste good? Well, fear not–completing this next step will make the planning so much less labor intensive, every time.
Identify your favorite food bloggers
Nailing down your go-to food bloggers is an absolute game-changer when it comes to meal planning. Instead of having to come up with an idea organically yourself every time, you can simply go to an experienced cook’s website and search through their (usually well organized) database. This is the multiple choice test embodiment of meal planning — to most of us, that sounds a hell of a lot better than short answer.
I didn’t even do this for the first couple of YEARS of my cooking journey. Once I figured this out, meal planning became an absolute breeze. I could even select meals and place my grocery order on Monday morning all before leaving for work if I had a particularly busy weekend, because I had some bloggers’ websites already lined up on my laptop for my convenience. And these bloggers became trusted sources of recipes for me–I didn’t feel like I was rolling the dice each time with some random recipe that might not be good. My favorite bloggers have never let me down.
If you are new to cooking or looking for simplicity, I would recommend going the Minimalist Baker route. Most of their recipes contain less than 10 ingredients and take less than 30 minutes to make. If you really want to focus on nutrition and understand which foods make you feel great and why, I would suggest checking out Pick Up Limes. And if you are like me–you love Indian food and look forward to that bi-yearly time you eat it at a restaurant, you can start eating approachable, gourmet Indian food on the regular right at home with Vegan Richa. All three of these bloggers bring serious deliciousness to the table — but there are many more like them, so feel free to conduct your own search and find which bloggers you are most into!
These top three tips alone will get you far — but they don’t mention breakfast! That is why I would suggest in addition to identifying your go-to bloggers, you do the following:
Identify your breakfast staples
I have three key beliefs about a weekday breakfast. One, it should not require any thought. I am not about thinking in the morning ya’ll — miss me with that sh*t. Two, it should not require any cooking — just assembly. And three, it should be quick and easy.
I mentioned in my 6 keys to growth in the kitchen that I am not interested in having a regular rotation of recipes I stick to. Breakfast on the weekdays is an exception to that — I have three main breakfasts I stick to. Namely, they are oatmeal (I know it’s boring, but give my version a chance), coconut yogurt, and a smoothie. On the weekends when I have more time, I like to switch it up a little.
The key here is always having the ingredients for these easy meals in stock. When you notice you are getting low, you can just tack the ingredient(s) onto your weekly grocery list. And having a rotation of 3 different breakfasts ensures both that you will not easily tire of any one meal, and that you will have a very small number of options to choose from. Someone such as myself who studied Economics, along with many consumers, will understand that having less to choose from is a good thing.
I am a big fan of getting a dose of fruit in the morning, so a pro tip here is to always have frozen fruit on hand — including chopped bananas if you’re into those. Frozen is often higher quality than fresh, as the fruits are frozen and thus preserved during their prime (we will talk about my frozen mango addiction in a separate article). You can even freeze veggies that you plan on tossing into your smoothies.
Now that you’ve gotten a picture of how I provide myself with 3 home cooked (or home assembled) meals per day, let’s talk about how I keep quality high at every serving.
Begin with the leftovers in mind
Before you mix all of the dressing into a 4-serving salad, STOP. Before you mix tofu with a crispy marinade into a creamy pasta, DON’T. Before you mix ingredients that will need to be reheated with those that should remain cold (or at room temperature once eaten again) — you get the idea. That’s a HARD NO.
I have not sat down to define my pillars of cooking, but if I were to, keeping ingredients separate to optimize leftovers would be one of them. My coworkers have laughed at me because I will sometimes bring a 5 lb bag consisting of several tupperware containers — up to 5 separate elements of food that will be assembled together to create my lunch. Some will be heated, some not. Sometimes it will all be heated, but the ingredients are stored separately to preserve the quality of each individual ingredient (as was the case with my peanut tofu stir-fry — none of that amazing tofu peanut coating would be rubbing off into the pasta and compromising the texture of the tofu!). Sometimes the ingredients need to be heated for different amounts of time, or through different methods (i.e. – microwave vs toaster oven — big difference).
Now, I’m not saying you have to be intense as I am and take up all the space in your office fridge. I just strongly recommend you are mindful of how you store your food by conceptualizing the result you want to create later. Keeping dressing separate from the salad assembly, for example, is something I do every single time religiously — it much better preserves the freshness and texture of the greens, along with the flavor and quality of the dish when it comes together again. If you are having guests over and eating everything in one session, go ahead and mix it all together to your heart’s desire! But if you are cooking for yourself and will eat the meal three more times, I would think twice about how you are assembling the finished product.
Avocado is another example of an ingredient I will keep separate, as it is a finicky fruit. Usually I eat half an avocado in a meal, and eat the other half as soon as possible the next day. Due to the quick perishability of avocados once they are cut open, I will store the remaining half in the fridge by wrapping it as tightly sealed as I can in plastic wrap to restrict the airflow around the fruit as much as possible. If I am feeling extra, I will even squeeze some bottled lime juice over it in the hopes that will help with preservation. This may help slightly, but the reality is avocados have a narrow window of prime (or even acceptable) quality, and you’ll need to consume both halves ideally within 12 hours.
Some good rules of thumb here — if a meal contains hot and cold/room temperature ingredients, those elements should be stored separately. If your meal has elements with drastically different textures (like crunchy toppings that you want to stay crunchy next time), those elements should be stored separately. If your meal has wet and dry ingredients that you don’t want to turn into a soggy mess, store those ingredients separately. Every time you eat a meal again, you can assemble the elements together and once again achieve a great result!
To finish off this article, I would like to readily acknowledge that sometimes life gets in the way, or we simply don’t feel like cooking. That is perfectly normal and expected! For days like those, feel free to order takeout — that certainly is nice once in a while, and you’ve earned it as a regular cook. But for times you’re not feeling effort OR expense, you must rely on your emergency stash, and:
Keep a stock of mind-numbingly easy staples
If you thought I was going to get through an entire article without mentioning mac n cheese, you were mistaken. (And no, I have not given up mac n cheese as a vegan — the boxed vegan macs are tasty, cheap, and easy to find!).
I like to have 4 boxes of vegan mac in stock at all times. I try not to rely on this even once a week, but it’s there for me whenever I need it. I have reached for it twice per week in the past–no shame! Life is constantly fluctuating, and sometimes we are just not in the mood ya’ll. I have had weeks at a time before where I did not cook once, and was spending an alarming amount of money on takeout. Was I feeling good? No. But I am a person, and sh*t happens!
We all have our times where we are absolutely slaying every obstacle or enemy that crosses our path and emerging victorious day-in and day-out, but we also have times where our demands need to chill out a little bit, and we need to find a way to make that happen. Having some super easy meals ready quickly like boxed vegan mac, vegan ramen, ready-made salads, or freezer meals can be a serious mental health and wallet-saver in times of need. Daiya and Sweet Earth make some fantastic high quality frozen vegan meals, and you can usually find pre-made vegan salads at your local grocery store. For these salads and the ramen, you will need to read the ingredient label to make sure it is vegan. In general, reading labels is just a great habit to get into. Just make sure these quick meals are your fallback and not your constant, especially when they are highly processed — otherwise you won’t be eating these foods because you are depleted or depressed. You will be depleted or depressed because you are eating these foods.
And there you have it — my master strategy for meal planning as a single, 9 to 5 professional. In review — pick one day to get planning done, plan out 3 meals from your favorite bloggers each containing 4 servings, have a regular breakfast rotation, optimize your leftovers, and always have an easy option to turn to that will be low-effort and ready in minutes.
Looking for tips on what kinds of ingredients to keep on hand, the most useful and affordable kitchen tools to start building your kitchen from the ground up, or ways to become inspired to learn to cook as a total newbie? I will be covering all of these topics and more in my Sunday articles, so please keep tuning in if these topics pertain to you! I hope this article leaves you equipped with useful ideas that will help you both reduce your energy expense meeting your food needs, and feel better in your daily life.