One week meals for one
May 22, 2019 8:30 PM Subscribe
I love the kitchn's weekly meal plans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but I live alone. Are there other meal plans like their "How I Prep a Week of Easy, Satisfying Meals for One"? I'll list the features I like inside.
- This is a plan for one person. I don't want to take a plan for two or four and try to math out how to make it work for one. I want plans for one (1) person.
- This meal plan lays out what to eat for every meal throughout the week, mixing and matching leftovers from previous meals for about five days.
- It's healthy; when I do this, I am eating a good amount of protein, vegetables, etc.
- The food tastes good!
- The "power hour" of prep on the weekend is clearly laid out, so I can just follow the steps and then follow the calendar and instructions for each day.
- I like that there's a grocery list provided for me. That makes shopping easier.
- The recipes are not too complicated, and mostly involve chopping vegetables and cooking things on the stove or reheating things in the oven.
Best answer: Buzzfeed's Clean Eating Challenge is like this.
posted by shadygrove at 10:27 PM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by shadygrove at 10:27 PM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]
Best answer: They've done several of these in different years and most of them seem to meet your criteria.
posted by shadygrove at 10:38 PM on May 22, 2019
posted by shadygrove at 10:38 PM on May 22, 2019
Best answer: Caveat and re-direct - I have just looked at the Buzzfeed links and it looks like they are for more than one person.
I have an on-paper suggestion: Judith Jones' cookbook The Pleasures Of Cooking For One SORT of does this. She doesn't necessarily do the "soup-to-nuts shopping list for everything" kind of thing for a whole week, but a good third of the book has grouped-together recipes where she gives you one recipe for the first night's dinner, and then right after it is a recipe for the "second night" which starts with "so now take the leftover lamb chop from last night and...." There's one grouping in particular where you take a one-pound pork tenderloin, and she walks you through some easy initial prep for three night's worth of meals:
* When you get it home you carve some cutlets off it for dinner that same day, and then you cut the rest into two pieces and pack them in the fridge. Then dinner that night is pork scallopine with the cutlets.
* Then you have the big piece of pork tenderloin the next night, that's a simple roast. Leftovers from that can be used in a ton of other recipes, which she also includes in the book.
* Finally the remaining raw piece can go in a stir-fry, which she also tells you about.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:23 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
I have an on-paper suggestion: Judith Jones' cookbook The Pleasures Of Cooking For One SORT of does this. She doesn't necessarily do the "soup-to-nuts shopping list for everything" kind of thing for a whole week, but a good third of the book has grouped-together recipes where she gives you one recipe for the first night's dinner, and then right after it is a recipe for the "second night" which starts with "so now take the leftover lamb chop from last night and...." There's one grouping in particular where you take a one-pound pork tenderloin, and she walks you through some easy initial prep for three night's worth of meals:
* When you get it home you carve some cutlets off it for dinner that same day, and then you cut the rest into two pieces and pack them in the fridge. Then dinner that night is pork scallopine with the cutlets.
* Then you have the big piece of pork tenderloin the next night, that's a simple roast. Leftovers from that can be used in a ton of other recipes, which she also includes in the book.
* Finally the remaining raw piece can go in a stir-fry, which she also tells you about.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:23 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
Reddit’s MealPrepSunday is mostly plans, recipes and photos for this type of thing.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:17 AM on May 23, 2019
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:17 AM on May 23, 2019
Response by poster: Hmm, is this an untapped market? 45 people have favorited this, but there's really only one other identified place that has a few similar meal plans in the comments. I was hoping for more. Maybe I need to do this on my own and sell a cookbook or something.
posted by sockermom at 8:25 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by sockermom at 8:25 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]
It doesn't quite meet all of your criteria, but I very much enjoy Cooksmarts for my meal planning needs. You can set how many servings you're making and it will scale the recipe for you. It includes 4 meals per week (dinners, presumably), but you can add as many as you like from the archives and it will generate the grocery list and prep steps accordingly. They do variations for each recipe for vegetarian, paleo, and gluten-free - I don't have any dietary restrictions, but sometimes I just like what they have going on in one of the options, and it's easy to switch meal by meal.
posted by ferociouskitty at 8:30 AM on May 23, 2019
posted by ferociouskitty at 8:30 AM on May 23, 2019
My hunch is that yes, this IS an untapped market. The whole "cooking for the single person" market is notoriously ill-served, in fact; most of what you'll find is hard-copy cookbooks, all of which bemoan the fact that supermarkets do a piss-poor job of selling items in smaller quantities. I have 3 "cooking for one" cookbooks and all of them grumble about that, and how the challenge solo diners face is "you only want lamb chops one night but supermarkets only sell them in family size packs, what the heck do you do with the other 3 chops then".
that may be part of why you're having a hard time finding other resources, many people assume singletons like us don't need a weekly meal-planning list because "well, hell, they can just cook one meal-for-a-family meal on Monday and that automatically gives them enough leftovers for the week, they're set". Which is why I love that Judith Jones book, becuase she turns that bug into a feature ("Welp, since you had to cook the whole pack of beef for that beef stew anyway or else it was gonna go bad, lemme show you how to turn the leftovers into a pasta sauce the following night").
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:34 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
that may be part of why you're having a hard time finding other resources, many people assume singletons like us don't need a weekly meal-planning list because "well, hell, they can just cook one meal-for-a-family meal on Monday and that automatically gives them enough leftovers for the week, they're set". Which is why I love that Judith Jones book, becuase she turns that bug into a feature ("Welp, since you had to cook the whole pack of beef for that beef stew anyway or else it was gonna go bad, lemme show you how to turn the leftovers into a pasta sauce the following night").
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:34 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
Another thought - you may want to expand into looking at meal plans for two instead of one. You may be able to find more of those, since everyone in the world assumes people are all gonna couple up and there's a very big "oooh, how cute look at the newlyweds starting out let's help them" mindset that probably caters to that.
The Kitchn has a week of dinners for two here that they say is more like "for one or two", and they also link to a discussion thread about tips people have had when they're grocery shopping as a single person (buying prepared chopped produce at the salad bar is both efficient - since you can only get the exact quantity you need - and a timesaver, since it's usually already chopped).
Here's one for three weeks; they flat-out admit that they picked recipes that could also be frozen, the idea being that you make something, eat your own portion and freeze the leftovers. But building a freezer stash may not be a bad idea for you anyway (hell, you could get to a week when you have so much built up in the freezer that you can just reheat your choice of stuff from the freezer and don't have to cook at all). This plan also says that it caters to people who like to batch-cook once a week.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:32 AM on May 24, 2019
The Kitchn has a week of dinners for two here that they say is more like "for one or two", and they also link to a discussion thread about tips people have had when they're grocery shopping as a single person (buying prepared chopped produce at the salad bar is both efficient - since you can only get the exact quantity you need - and a timesaver, since it's usually already chopped).
Here's one for three weeks; they flat-out admit that they picked recipes that could also be frozen, the idea being that you make something, eat your own portion and freeze the leftovers. But building a freezer stash may not be a bad idea for you anyway (hell, you could get to a week when you have so much built up in the freezer that you can just reheat your choice of stuff from the freezer and don't have to cook at all). This plan also says that it caters to people who like to batch-cook once a week.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:32 AM on May 24, 2019
Response by poster: Yeah, I have a freezer stash and batch cook and have all kinds of techniques for feeding myself, but I have been following the kitchns weekly meal plan for one for a while and really enjoy it, so I want more of the same. I really am not interested in looking at meal plans geared towards couples or families.
posted by sockermom at 7:35 AM on May 24, 2019
posted by sockermom at 7:35 AM on May 24, 2019
When I cook for one on business trips, I pick some of the more appealing things from JustBento. The recipes are "per person", mostly within my skill set, good variety, and tasty. It's convenient that usually when I'm on a trip, it's in Japan where all the ingredients are, but I can also find them at my high-end (expensive) grocery store, or Amazon in a pinch, and most of the oddballs are long-lasting staples like Mirin and cooking sake.
I don't know if I'd cook all of them a week ahead. Some of them could probably work like that. Almost all could wait a day or two before eating. Most of them are reasonably quick though, and the recipes feature timelines of when to start what and what can be prepared ahead.
posted by ctmf at 10:04 PM on May 26, 2019
I don't know if I'd cook all of them a week ahead. Some of them could probably work like that. Almost all could wait a day or two before eating. Most of them are reasonably quick though, and the recipes feature timelines of when to start what and what can be prepared ahead.
posted by ctmf at 10:04 PM on May 26, 2019
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posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 9:04 PM on May 22, 2019 [5 favorites]