When friends and family find out that Mr. Dink and I cook 95% of our meals at home, we get a lot of wide-eyed stares. We LOVE to treat ourselves occasionally to a fancy dinner out, but eating out for us is rare and typically for a special occasion or celebrating small wins (and we like it that way).
Even though the numbers are down from pre-pandemic levels, a new survey shows that 7% of people eat out an average of 4 days per week, 16% 3 days per week, and 44% one day per week. No judgement at all, and by all means, if you have the money to afford this and eating out truly brings you joy, you do you. But if you’re looking to decrease your eating-out habits (whether for monetary, health, or other reasons), I’m hoping that sharing our process of how we plan and shop for meals with you today might give you a little inspiration!
Some of the most common points of contention I hear from friends and family about why they don’t cook at home more are 1) “we don’t have time to meal plan,” 2) “we don’t like leftovers,” and 3) “it’s too hard to cook every night”. Let me first say, I hear you. I feel very lucky that Mr. Dink and I have figured out our system. But I will say that it took us a lot of time and energy (and the occasional fight) to figure out what works best for us, and it can still be a work in progress. For sure, our strategy is not going to work for everyone. But I thought by sharing how we came up with our system, it might help some people who don’t even know where to start take baby steps, or inspire them to start their own process.
A brief history
When Mr. Dink and I first met, we were full-on single people. We’d each been single for over a year, and we were definitely each set in our ways when it came to cooking.
When we first started dating, it was rare that we cooked together. Mostly, one of us would cook for the other when we visited each other. We each had our own cooking styles. Then, as the relationship progressed, we slowly started to cook together, and we found it was something we loved to do. As single people, neither of us had found cooking for one very fun, but we liked the health and variety it brought, so we did it anyway. When we started cooking together, we learned that we in fact LOVED being a team in the kitchen. It became one of our major bonding times together. With each of us working full time jobs, and not wanting children, our evenings are our main times together, just the two of us, and the fact that that involves cooking together is something we have come to really love. We don’t always cook together, occasionally one of us will cook the whole meal, but the majority of the time we are tag-teaming our dinners.
How COVID turned us into meal planners and scheduled grocery shoppers
Before COVID, Mr. Dink and I would shop at the grocery store multiple times per week, always with a plan for what’s for dinner, but rarely with a list. Without a list, we would usually get everything we needed for dinner, but sometimes we would forget a crucial ingredient, and often we would come home with more than what we needed.
Then, COVID happened.
When COVID started, naturally like everyone else, we wanted to minimize our trips to the grocery store. First, we tried going every 2 weeks, and over the course of the pandemic, as things started to open up more and more, the vaccines rolled out, and we felt safer in the world, we started going once per week.
We also used to go shopping together, but during the pandemic, we quickly learned that Mr. Dink preferred being the only one to go. My anxiety would run rampant in early COVID days when I went to the store (I worked from home and so my outside world experience shrank like crazy). Mr. Dink was used to going out a bit (after the initial lockdown), as he continued to run his carpentry business and serve his clients in our community.
We got so used to the routine that even now, with things feeling much more back to normal, we have kept that same overall schedule. Now, on Sunday mornings, when I go to church, Mr. Dink calls his dad and goes grocery shopping.
Meal planning
Since Mr. Dink shops on Sunday mornings, we plan our meals for the week before we each go about our days. Mr. Dink has a little notebook where he writes down the meals we’ve decided on for the week so that we don’t forget (if you can believe it, when we don’t write down the meals we’ve planned, even when we’ve shopped for the ingredients, we can still completely forget what we thought of. We’re human and busy, people!).
Then, at the same time we write the meals we’ve planned down on paper, we’re also adding ingredients to the shopping list.
Our shopping list
Mr. Dink and I both have iPhones, and the Reminders app is where we keep our shopping list. We have one dedicated Reminder’s list labelled Shopping, that we can share between our phones, so that when one person adds something, the other will also see it on their list. Mr. Dink has even gotten so fancy, since he’s the one who goes to the store, that he’ll rearrange the list to be in order of how he goes through the store. He’ll even arrange it for me on the rare occasion that I do the shopping (what a guy).
In addition to adding our ingredients for our meals for the week, we also do a quick run through of any staples we need for the week that we are out of (milk, eggs, bread, lunch meats, snacks, etc.). We also try to be really good about adding things during the week as soon as we notice we’ve run out of something. For example, we cook a lot of Asian meals, and so we go through a lot of Asian sauces, like soy sauce, oyster sauce, hoisin sauce, etc. We try really hard to add these items to the list as soon as we’ve run out, or when we’re close to running out. The tricky part is that we have to do this as we’re cooking, which is often a busy time. This is another reason we both try to be present during cooking time (in addition to loving to cook together), even if the other person is doing most of the cooking. I’ll often ask Mr. Dink to add something to the Shopping list while I’m cooking, or vice versa. For really important things that we use all the time like soy sauce and mayo, we’ll often keep one extra bottle or jar in the pantry as a backup, so when someone goes to open that extra bottle, that is the time to add it to the list.
Meals
For sure, planning meals can be overwhelming. But I promise once you start, it will only get easier and easier. Below are some of my best tips for making it even easier.
loves and desires
You’ll find as you go that you have dishes that you love, that are easy to make, and that are delicious and/or you could eat all the time. Don’t shy away from cooking those dishes often! You could put those on your list every other week or once a month, whatever you prefer. These are great meals to make on a harder or busier day when you don’t really want to think too much about dinner.
For example, Mr. Dink loves pasta (and is really good at cooking it), so we try to put a pasta dish on our list of meals at least every week or every other week.
On the other hand, if you know you’ll have a particularly easier day or week of work or life sometime, you could pick that week to try a new dish, something you’ve been desiring to make. Have a place that you store these “desire” recipes that you come across throughout the days and weeks that you can go to for inspiration. In my case, I have a recipes folder in my email inbox as well as a bookmarks folder on my computer where I store recipes.
You can also plan meals around events you love. Mr. Dink and I love to watch football together, and so during football season, Sundays are our time to have “football food”. We have a rotating menu of foods we love to cook for football, including things like wings, pizza bagels, chicken nachos, and calzones.
a twist on leftovers
When I met Mr. Dink, he was VERY anti-leftovers. And I can’t say I blamed him.
I grew up eating lots of leftovers, so as much as I didn’t love them, I was used to them. When I was single, I ate leftovers a lot. But when Mr. Dink and I got together, I found he really wouldn’t eat them. I couldn’t eat them all myself since we were cooking so much, and I HATE throwing away food. Like, really hate it. So I decided to get creative.
One of the things I’m most proud of in our cooking lives is my leftover hacks. The trick with this method of mine is to make at least one meal a week where you can reap the benefits of having cooked that meal in other meals. One of my favorite examples of a leftover hack is roasting a chicken. Early in the week, we will roast a chicken with potatoes, carrots, and onions or leeks (you can sub for any good roasting vegetables here), and then you can use the chicken meat all week in other meals. You could make chicken salad for sandwiches. You could do a chicken stir fry by only having to make rice and sauté some vegetables. Or you could make an easy chicken curry meal by using a premade sauce (we are particular fans of the yellow curry premade sauces from Hannaford and Trader Joe’s). The possibilities are endless for how you could use this chicken. *Pro tip: chop the tops off of a few garlic bulbs and throw them in with the chicken.
Another example of a leftover hack we like to do is with salmon. We like to get more than we need for one meal, pan fry some of it, and bake the rest. That way, we can use the baked salmon later in the week in a pasta dish or stir fry.
Besides roasting a chicken, one of the most prolific leftover hacks we do is with pork and fried rice. We will often first make a pork tenderloin, which Mr. Dink loves to cook, with a vegetable and a starch of some sort. Then, another night, we will make fried rice (which is one of our “love” category dishes that, at this point, Mr. Dink could make with his eyes closed). Fried rice is another dinner gift that keeps on giving. We’ll have it the first night with the leftover pork from the pork tenderloin, and it makes enough for at least 2 more meals after that. You can have it plain as a side, for lunch with a fried egg on top, with dumplings on the side (these ones from Costco are our favorite). Or, if you want to be real fancy, with a homemade General Tso’s chicken recipe.
Some of my favorite benefits of the leftover hack are saving money and time. Not only do you have to buy fewer overall ingredients with leftover hacks (one whole chicken instead of different meats for multiple nights), but you also save TIME. And who, especially in the financial independence community, doesn’t love a time saver? In our case, because we’ve already made a main ingredient that we’ll be using in one of our “leftover hack” dishes, we have more time in the evenings during our cooking time to catch up on our days and talk about life.
We will eat just straight leftovers once in awhile, but it’s rare. We’ve found that really the only meals we like as actual leftovers are spaghetti and soups.
seasonal meals
The mention of soups brings me to my seasonal meal-planning tip, which is to plan some meals in alignment with the seasons.
For example, in the summer, we get our CSA (community supported agriculture) from the farm across from our house. So, we plan our meals around what we get for veggies for the week. Typically, we make a lot of classic “meat, potatoes, and a veg” meals in the summer because of what’s available at the farm. This year, instead of growing a variety of potatoes, the only ones they grew at the farm were fingerling potatoes. We LOVE fingerling potatoes, and we had a lot of fun cooking those most weeks.
In the winter, we get really into soups and chilis. These also make great straight-up leftover meals. We will typically do a soup (chicken noodle, chicken and rice, a Thai chicken soup that is one of Mr. Dink’s favorites, beef and vegetable soup, etc.) one week, and then we’ll make a chili the next week. There are so many different types of soup and chilis you can make, so you can go weeks in the winter without having to have the same thing again (tip: if you’re going to make chili, definitely make cornbread to go with it – this one is our favorite boxed variety, and if we’re feeling fancy or we have more time, we’ll make it from scratch with cornmeal).
If for whatever reason you don’t feel like you can eat all the leftovers of the soup one week, if you have a particularly busy week, or if you don’t want to eat the same thing twice in one week, you can freeze the soup leftovers and they’ll be like new when you go to have them again at a later time. And bonus, you won’t have to cook it when you go to eat it later!
other shares
“Shares” of things these days are really in style, and you may be able to take advantage of these to meal plan for the week. For example, the farm where we get our CSA also offers a fish share, which is delivered to the farm on Wednesdays for pickup. They send the menu out every Saturday morning, which is perfect for our meal-planning schedule. When we go to meal plan on Sunday, we look at the email and decide if we like any of the fish offerings and want to include it in our meal plan for the week. We love getting a white fish like cod or haddock to make fish tacos with.
There is also a meat share we can participate in, and I know through friends and family that other share varieties can include bread and cheese (snack dinner, anyone??). And bonus, buying portions of these food shares is also a way to support your local community.
Hannaford rewards
As the writer of a personal finance blog, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about a major way that we easily save money grocery shopping with minimal effort.
The closest grocery store to our house in a Hannaford, and we are members of the My Hannaford Rewards program. By being a My Hannaford Rewards member (for free), we save money on things we were going to buy anyway.
If you shop at Hannaford, I highly recommend this free program (and I am not getting paid to write this, I simply love it!). You sign up for free, and all you have to do is either enter your phone number or scan the barcode in the phone app every time you shop to reap the benefits. That’s it.
Cash back
When you purchase store-brand products, which we do a lot for most things (we don’t mind the store brand), you earn 2% back. Hannaford keeps track of this over the quarter, and at the end of the quarter, they will tell you how many rewards you earned. You can then activate those rewards (on their website or app), and you’ll be able to use those rewards the next time you shop as long as you enter your phone number or scan the barcode on your phone app. The money is then immediately deducted from your grocery bill.
For example, we redeemed $11.63 last quarter and $41.32 total this year so far on our groceries. It may not be a ton, but it’s not nothing for things you were going to buy anyway!
Super easy online coupons
The other main feature of the My Hannaford Reward program is their easy online coupon system.
You can make it as easy or as complicated as you want. You can browse online for coupons that you want to clip. We go the easy route. They send me emails occasionally with coupons, and I go online and scan through the ones they’ve picked for me and see if there’s any I want to use.
I know that coupons can be an easy way to buy things that you don’t need, so I try to only use them to buy things that we need (with the occasional splurge when there’s a Ben and Jerry’s coupon).
They also even have some “free” items sometimes! They’ll often offer a “free” Hannaford brand seltzer or something similar that, in my opinion, can often add a little joy to your shopping experience.
My favorite coupons are when they have money off of a “basket”. For example, “$10 off a basket of $80 or more.” Because we shop for the whole week, we often are spending more than $80 at the grocery store, and so these coupons feels like a total win for us. $10 off a grocery trip we were going to take anyway? Yes, please!
Closing thoughts
As I said at the beginning, this system is simply what works for us. It may not work for you, but I hope that if streamlining your meal planning and/or grocery shopping experience is something that you’ve wished you could be better/more efficient at, this post has been helpful and has given you the inspiration you need to change things up!
And who’s to say that a new way of doing things will be how it’ll be forever?
Now that our system of meal planning and grocery shopping has become such a big part of our life, we are pretty set in our ways. Neither of us enjoy going to the grocery store any longer and not having a plan. Our system has allowed both of us to feel empowered about our meal planning and grocery shopping experiences. It has been a game changer for us!
But, sometimes we reminisce about the old days. Recently, we had a spontaneous Saturday where we didn’t have anything planned for dinner and we went to the “big city” of Burlington, VT, to run some errands. Mr. Dink suggested we “do something fun”, go to the store, and plan what we wanted for dinner while at the store. I was SUPER skeptical, and pictured it ending in a ginormous argument. But, he was really excited about it, and I supposed that after 2+ years of solid meal planning, it was finally time to be spontaneous again.
And you know what? It was a huge success (even if part of the success was due to the knowledge that we’d never have to do it again if it was a nightmare).
Nothing in life is set in stone. So why not give something new a try?
How do you and your family plan meals? Are you more of a planner, or are you more spontaneous? Let me know in the comments; I’d love to hear from you!