Meal Planning Framework

About a year after our son was born, I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. Managing it meant cutting out most processed foods and cooking nearly everything from scratch. That would have been fine on its own — but I was also a new parent, sleep-deprived, and already feeling like I was spending every spare moment in the kitchen. Something had to give.

I couldn't go back to processed food. And I couldn't cook every single day. So I started building a system.

The Core Idea

The goal isn't to find the perfect recipe. It's to make cooking feel less relentless. That means shifting work away from the high-pressure evening hours and spreading it across the week in short, manageable chunks.

The targets I set for myself:

Clean and cut produce only 3x per week
Actually cook only 4 days per week
Shop only 2x per week
Have dinner on the table in 10–15 minutes most nights
Keep everything made from whole foods, mostly from scratch

The key to making those last two co-exist is cooking asynchronously — doing the work ahead of time so that "making dinner" is mostly just reheating and assembling. More on the specific methods below.

The Weekly Rhythm

I shop twice a week, usually Monday or Tuesday and again Thursday or Friday. The spread matters: it keeps sensitive items like meat and dairy fresh without requiring daily trips.

On shopping days, I try to start cooking the same afternoon. My kids still nap, which gives me a reliable one-to-two hour window to get things started. If I can't cook that afternoon, the next morning is my fallback — I'll carve out a bigger chunk of time to do most of the week's prep.

Dinners are almost always microwave-ready. Either something has been in the crock pot all day, a protein came out of the sous vide, or there's a batch of soup in the fridge waiting to be heated. The kids are playing, dinner comes together in under 15 minutes, and we get the evening back.

Breakfasts during the week are fast by design. I make baked oatmeal in batches and freeze it in individual portions. In the morning I pop it in the microwave for the whole family and add some fruit or a smoothie. Done.

Lunches get a little more flexibility. On slower mornings, the kids can help put together a salad — which is actually one of the better ways to get them engaged with food. On preschool days, we do sandwiches: fast, low-mess, minimal cleanup.

One of the biggest shifts in my thinking was accepting that I don't need variety for its own sake. A shorter menu of meals I know well is faster to shop for, easier to batch, and less mentally taxing than trying to cook something new every week.

I organize everything into four categories:

Mix & Match: Protein + Veggie + Starch

The most flexible category. Pick one from each column and you have a meal. Proteins are often done sous vide ahead of time; everything else roasts while I'm doing something else.

Proteins: Pork tenderloin, chicken breast, steak

Vegetables: Italian sheet pan, broccoli, cauliflower steaks, Brussels sprouts, squash, asparagus

Starches: Brown rice, quinoa, sweet potatoes, potatoes

Soups & Stews

This is where the crock pot earns its keep. I'll start one in the morning and it's ready by dinner. Almost all of these freeze well, so I often make a double batch.

Beef and barley (over rice)
Annie's tortilla soup (over rice)
Italian pork and white bean
Provençal chicken
Homestyle chicken
Paranto white bean soup
Farro butternut squash
Pumpkin turkey chili
Italian lentil soup
Smoky chicken and lentil soup

Big Pot

One pan or pot, lots of servings. These are the workhorses of the week.

Pork and pickled green beans (over rice)
Chicken teriyaki stir-fry (over rice)
Spanish rice with turkey
Chicken cacciatore
Meatballs and spaghetti squash
Shakshuka with poached eggs over rice
Braised cauliflower

Sandwiches

The "crunch time" category. Fast to assemble, easy to adapt for the kids.

Protein with hummus on tortillas (plus a veg)
Mexican quinoa with sautéed veg and greens

Asynchronous Cooking

The secret ingredient in all of this is cooking methods that don't require me to be present. My two favorites:

Sous vide for proteins. I can seal up a pork tenderloin or a few chicken breasts in the morning and they'll be perfectly cooked hours later with zero monitoring. When dinner time comes, a quick sear is optional but the protein is already done.

Crock pot for soups, stews, and braises. Load it up, walk away. It's also one of the best ways to turn cheaper, tougher cuts of meat into something really good.

I also use the microwave more than people might expect — not just for reheating, but for cooking pasta and softening vegetables faster during prep. It cuts down on pots and on active stove time.

I plan to write a full post on asynchronous cooking methods at some point, because it's one of the highest-leverage things I've done to make cooking feel sustainable.

Planning the Week

The practical starting point is simple: look at your week, identify the days that are going to be chaotic, and make sure those are microwave nights. Then fill in backward from there — what needs to be prepped the day before? What can the crock pot handle?

Pick your shopping days first, then your prep windows, then your cooking days. Everything else falls into place around those anchors.

It took me a few months of iteration to settle into a version of this that felt automatic. Now it mostly runs itself.