🗓️How to plan a week of meals in one sitting
Deciding what to cook every evening is the expensive part. Here's how to make the decision once a week and let the rest follow.
The tiring part of cooking isn't the cooking. It's the small decision you make at 6pm every day, when you're already low on patience: what do we eat tonight, and is there anything in the fridge to make it with? Planning a week at once doesn't take much longer than planning one evening — it just moves the decision to a moment when you're not hungry.
- 01
Start from the days, not the recipes
Open the week and look at it before you think about food. Which evenings are you actually home? Which ones end late? A plan that ignores your calendar gets abandoned by Wednesday. In Millo the meal planner is the app's home tab — a grid calendar you can read in monthly or weekly view — so the week is the first thing you see.
- 02
Fill the hard slots first
Put something on the evenings you know will be difficult — the late ones, the ones with guests. Those are the days that derail a plan. Each day holds meals by type (breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack), and each meal can carry one or more recipes, so a dinner made of two dishes stays one entry.
- 03
Say how many people are eating
Set the number of people on the meal, not in your head. Recipe quantities scale to match, which is what makes the shopping list correct later. Four people on Sunday and two on Tuesday should not produce the same amount of pasta.
- 04
Let the repeats repeat
Most weeks are more repetitive than we admit, and that's a feature. Set a meal to repeat daily, weekly or monthly — ending never, on a date, or after a number of times — and stop re-entering the same Tuesday lunch. When you remove one, you choose whether to delete just that day, this and every future occurrence, or the whole series.
The step everyone forgets
A plan fails at the freezer more often than at the stove. If Thursday's dinner needs something defrosted, set a defrost reminder on that meal — you pick when the notification arrives, and it has to be before the meal time. It's the one reminder that actually saves a dinner.
The plan is only half the point
A week of meals that doesn't turn into a shopping list is still homework. Everything you plan rolls straight into one list, with quantities of the same item combined across recipes — so planning the week is also writing the shopping list, whether you meant to or not.