Planning a week of meals for one

At home, food may simply appear: someone shopped, someone cooked. On your own, the gap between eating well and living on snacks is usually about fifteen minutes of planning once a week. Here is a method you can use from your very first week.

Why bother planning

• A plan decides tonight's dinner for you, so you are not standing in front of an empty fridge at 9pm reaching for a delivery app.
• Love Food Hate Waste explains that writing your shopping list from a plan removes the guesswork about quantities, so you buy what you need and waste less.
• Planning also protects your budget: you buy one set of ingredients that covers several meals instead of lots of half-used packs.
• It does not have to be rigid. A plan is a starting point you can swap around during the week.

Step 1: start with your real week

• Open your timetable and mark each evening as a cooking day, a busy day (late lectures, sport, a shift) or an eating-out day.
• Love Food Hate Waste says to be realistic about busy days: plan the simplest meals for them, or a portion you batch cooked earlier and froze.
• Count how many meals you actually need at home. For example, 5 dinners and 5 lunches, because you eat out with friends on Friday and go to a family friend's on Sunday.
• Breakfast is usually the same most days, so you may not need to plan it, only to keep the basics in stock.

Step 2: pick meals with a simple balance check

• Use the NHS Eatwell Guide as your check: fruit and vegetables should make up just over a third of what you eat each day, and starchy foods (ideally wholegrain or higher fibre) also just over a third.
• Add a protein to most meals: beans, lentils, eggs, chicken, meat or fish. The Eatwell Guide suggests at least two 140 g portions of fish a week, one of them oily, such as salmon or mackerel.
• Aim for at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. The NHS says 80 g of fresh, tinned or frozen fruit or vegetables counts as one portion.
• Balance over the day and the week. One quick pasta night is fine if the rest of the week has plenty of vegetables.

Step 3: build the week around a few shared ingredients

• Choose 2 or 3 'anchor' ingredients and use each in more than one meal, so you finish whole packs. Love Food Hate Waste gives the example of one pack of chicken covering several recipes.
• Swap ingredients freely: if a recipe asks for parsnips and you already have carrots, use carrots.
• Plan one 'throw it all in' meal for the day before your shop, such as a soup, stew, curry or homemade pizza, to use whatever fresh food is left.
• Keep one 'freezer day' with frozen vegetables or a frozen portion, so the plan survives a surprise invitation or a late lecture.

A sample week for one (illustrative)

• Anchors this week: a pack of halal chicken thighs, a bag of red lentils, eggs, frozen mixed vegetables and a bag of spinach.
• Monday (cooking day): red lentil and spinach dal with rice. Make 3 portions: eat 1, fridge 1 for Tuesday lunch, freeze 1.
• Tuesday (busy): omelette with frozen vegetables and toast. Wednesday: chicken thigh tray bake with vegetables; cook extra chicken for Thursday.
• Thursday: chicken, spinach and yoghurt wraps. Friday: eating out with friends.
• Saturday: 'throw it all in' pasta with tinned tomatoes and whatever vegetables are left. Sunday: the frozen dal portion, or a new recipe to try.

Make planning a habit

• Pick a style: a notebook, a fridge whiteboard you photograph, or a phone note you copy each week. Love Food Hate Waste suggests all three.
• If a full week feels too much, try a rolling plan: each day, add one more day to the end of the plan.
• Keep a favourites list of meals you cook often and where the recipe is, and try to add one new recipe a month.
• Choose a fixed planning time, for example Sunday after lunch, and write the shopping list at the same time.