


Meal planning can help you manage that mental load so that cooking dinner feels less like a chore and begins to become something you actually enjoy. Putting healthy and delicious meals on the table every day is about far more than just the actual act of cooking: There is a vast mental load that goes into cooking, from selecting recipes to making grocery lists to keeping tabs on what ingredients you have on hand and what needs to be used up, in addition to remembering family members’ varying likes and dislikes and dietary restrictions. And I’m almost never stressed about what to cook for dinner on any given night because I’ve already decided ahead of time - and I always have the exact ingredients I need for that recipe in my fridge. It would not be an exaggeration to say that meal planning changed my life: I’ve become a better home cook since I started meal planning, becoming more confident in my cooking skills and more adventurous in the types of recipes I try out. (During that time, I also became a parent, making time, energy, and money ever more finite resources in my household meal planning has helped make things slightly more manageable.) I have a searchable database of more than 1,500 recipes that I’ve bookmarked over the years. This organizational strategy has made my weeknight dinners easier and more efficient, saved me time and money, and kept my life organized. For the past six years, I have been devoted to the strategy of planning out the meals I’ll cook each week. But there is a way to make cooking dinner much simpler and far less anxiety-inducing: meal planning.
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And if you’re busy, or just overwhelmed by other parts of your life, figuring out how to feed yourself three times a day, every single day, becomes even more challenging. Without a plan, figuring out dinner might involve running out to the grocery store after work to buy ingredients for the recipe you’ve just decided to make and finally eating at 9, or it might end in giving up and ordering takeout once again because you just can’t figure out what to cook. Have you ever stared at the contents of your refrigerator at 7 pm, trying to figure out what you might be able to concoct with the random assortment of items you have on hand? Deciding what to cook for dinner every night, whether you’re feeding yourself, a partner, or an entire family, is a task that involves far more mental work than just cooking - it also takes planning, preparation, and organization. A not-intimidating guide to meal planning
