Kind of a random question but genuinely curious about your cooking decisions
So, I'm moving out of my parents house soon and, methodic and productivity-seeking as I am, I'm wondering: how do people usually plan their meals?
I don't want to be having to make decisions on what I eat every time but rather have some sort of system in place like: sunday's pizza, monday's pasta, and so on. Not to be 100% strict on the schedule but to have some sort of structure to reduce decission making.
Does it make sense? Is there any app tackling this 'issue'?
If you single on your own, you'd probably have the X items that are easy and available, either cooked or bought that keep a while, doesn't matter if it's dried, frozen for friged..
You don't plan much as a single person, there is what comes natural to you and that's about it. you might over think it in the 1st few weeks, possible more in terms of "shopping wtf? how are these not at home?"
Planning comes usually when it's either for multiple people and/or special diets cause suddenly you have to think.
There is also all the "Food prep" niche
And ready to eat/cook/.. delivery options..
If your super pedantic, you don't need more then a white/chook board, notebook or scheduler.. physical or digital ..
I've seen a few horrible meal planning apps around, I don't think they get traction unless they are packed with something much bigger like a full persona diet content..
Meal planning apps are so horrible and people are so lazy that usually it ends up being improvised in the moment I guess? Plus it's not that much of a deal really, you just cook what you have available and think of different meals when you're at the supermarket (or before if you made a list) and that's it.
But isn't this a niche that could use a well crafted app to schedule meals and ingredients?
Do you have a reason to believe you can make one radically better than the 100's of attempts people had at this?
I think the problem space gets more complicated cause people are, not many do this is in a mechanical format that has a planning and execution phase and I don't think you'd find many describing this as a big pain or at all..
It's a maybe a cute thingy level
This all sounds right to me based on conversations I've had with others about food, meals, planning, and what they eat. Although, it's possible I'm having the wrong conversations.
Instead, I've been building out a larger platform because meal planning alone doesn't seem to get you there. Most people start off with good intentions about it and then fall off because it's a pain or they forget an ingredient at the store and then fall off the wagon (rational or otherwise). Plus, meal planning and prep takes time. Instead of focusing on the just that niche, I've chosen to look at different groups in the fitness community to target first with meal planning, tracking, and so forth. These people are already motivated to do these kinds of things to help with their goals/performance.
I'm definitely curious to know if any of the conversations either of you have had with potential customers have suggested otherwise.
It's an interesting aproach to focus on those niches first, since, like you said, already have the motivation to be structured and have their meals scheduled. I haven't really talked with any customers since this was more of a personal question I had to figure this out. I woulnd't like to have to think every meal on the spot, I'd rather have most of them predefined and just get in the kitchen and cook without much decission making.
Exactly our thoughts. So we plan it in advance (beginning of the week), do our shopping, and then each day, we know what we are making.
We also try to build in assumptions about left overs (this meal will make 1-2 extra meals) so that lunches can be accommodated. It helps us to save some money rather than having to go shopping again and buying things we don't actually need.
That said, we don't go full "meal prep", we mostly just plan and then make on the day/night. Meal prep is also useful, we just had a hard time keeping up with it because we have 2 young kids that made it more difficult, so we tried to compromise a little.
For me, when I moved out of my parent's house, I decided to not to eat out at fast food joints for my meals. It was a way to force myself to cook something. It didn't have to be anything fancy, but it forced me to start cooking more for myself. The only exception was ordering pizza, which would serve as food for the next few days lol. But other than that, start off with things that are easy to do (ramen noodles) or last a while (cooking a lot of macaroni and cheese in bulk) Build a positive habit for cooking, and experiment with simple things to make them better (adding eggs or other spices to ramen. Attempting to combine some basic ingredients together, etc)
Definitely have eggs on-hand though. They're economical and very versatile. They can be combined into a number of different meals.
Also have frozen food on-hand (I usually have chicken tenders w/ waffle fries) for days that you may not feel like cooking, baking is an easy fallback. It's good to store food in the freezer since it lasts a while in there.
Good advice. Will definitely cook a lot of rice with different stuff like fried onion, capsicum, eggs and spices!
Good luck!
I'm not sure how comfortable you are with cooking, but when I moved on my own, I did six months of Blue Apron by buying Costco gift cards and redeem them. I did a food delivery option because cooking is hard. I was overwhelmed and was easy to slip and go eat out. This taught me how to cook better, buy different types of ingredients that before I did not know about, better spices, and so on.
Now I find it easy to plan my meals for the week. I use budgetbytes.com most of the time, go to a category of food that would use the same type of ingredients so that I can mix and match, and every day, I could eat different things based on the same ingredients.
Gonna check out budget bytes further, it looks really interesting.
I've got no problem cooking myself so that won't be an issue, it's just the decision making and uncertaintiy that grinds my gears.
I cook at home on Sundays for the whole week - Tasty app has a lot of short recipes that anyone who can drive a car can figure out how to cook - This has saved me a lot of money.
Woah, that's a lot of time cooking if you're making food for the whole week on just one day, isn't it?
(Ramen Noodles)(3)(7). Done.
Just kidding, don't do that! :-)
When I was growing up my mom worked and basically had like 12 "go to" meals that she rotated for basically my entire childhood. I know it sounds boring but we liked the meals and we ate out often enough that it wasn't like we had no variety.
So, I recommend finding like around a dozen healthy, well rounded meals that you really like, learn how to cook them, and then create a shopping list that includes all the ingredients for those meals.
Pick some day of the week as your standard grocery shopping day, take your list and knock it out quickly. Then you should be prepared and ready to deploy one of those dozen meals at any given time.
Then go back to hacking!
That's an interesting approach, I really like it, thanks!!
You're welcome!
You can save a lot of time preparing your meals for the whole week the weekend before. Just cook 2-3 variants and freeze them.
Hmm, what would those be for example?
Basically anything that's good for freezing ;) Especially one-pot meals like chili con carne, risotto, curry etc. I don't recommend freezing stuff like potatoes, pasta, tortillas though.
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And how do you plan on variety? Or is it just buying whatever you feel like buying?
Relying on memory can be tricky for people like me with poor memory haha
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Makes sense. Thanks for the info!