The visual meal planner: a week of meals, one shop
Meal planning fails on the overlap: seven meals bought separately means three half-used bags of coriander. Plan the week as a board and let the shared ingredients and the leftovers become visible.
The short version
A week of meals is planned well when the ingredients overlap and badly when they do not. Choose two or three meals that share a base, put them on one board as pictures, and mark what each one carries over into the next. The waste and the second shop both come from meals planned in isolation.
A sample board
This week
Five nights, one shop. Things that share ingredients sit next to each other.
- Items
- 6
- Cooked
- 1 of 6
- Total
- $74
- Budget
- $16 left of $90
Open any item for its details.
$14PlannedNight · MondayEffort · WeeknightShares with · Stir fry
$11PlannedNight · TuesdayEffort · WeeknightShares with · Grain bowl
$8CookedNight · SundayEffort · Weeknight
$9MaybeNight · LunchEffort · Weeknight
$10MaybeNight · With anythingShares with · Wraps
$22MaybeStore · Fielder HomeEffort · One off
Board photos from Unsplash, by Leanna Myers, Ravi Sharma, Jonathan Cooper, Max Griss, Vinn Koonyosying and Ella Olsson.
Who it's for
Anyone shopping for a week at a time and trying to cook most of what they buy.
What people use today
Mealime and Paprika generate lists from recipes and are good at it. They assume you already know what you are cooking. The choosing part, which is where the overlap and the leftovers get decided, is still done in a notes app on a Sunday.
What a board tracks here
Fields you name yourself, on the item they belong to. These are the ones that decide a purchase and have nowhere else to live.
- Which night
- A plan without days is a list. The day is what makes it a plan.
- Shares with
- The other meal this one's ingredients overlap with. The single field that reduces the shop.
- Leftovers to
- What Tuesday's roast becomes on Wednesday, decided in advance rather than at the fridge.
- Effort
- Weeknight or weekend. Putting a two hour braise on a Thursday is how a plan collapses.
Start one of your own.
Paste a link from any store and Vurra reads the page for a title, price and image. Free while Vurra is in early access.