Leftovers

Leftovers are the key to liberating yourself from the meal preparation treadmill. With a little bit of planning you can eat well every day of the week and only cook twice. This is far easier to achieve if you have the support of the entire household. Do not excuse yourself from meal planning and preparation based solely on your genitalia. I strongly recommend using Todoist to track your meal planning, but you may use any calendar or todo app that fits your needs.

Meal Planning Day

Pick a day of the week in which you can accomplish your grocery shopping first thing in the morning. If you work remotely try to pick a weekday in order to avoid the weekend shopping rush. Over your morning beverage, use recipe books from your personal collection or local library to pick out two meals you want to make over the next week. If this is your first time making the meal you may want to proceed with the recipe as written. If you are already familiar with the quantity that is produced by the recipe you may choose to double it. Capture your grocery items in whatever list manager or notebook works for you. I’m a fan of OurGroceries because it groups items by department automatically and my partner and I can check items off on our personal devices as we shop together.

Habits are easiest to form when they are predictable, so pick two days of the week that you are most likely to succeed at cooking for yourself. My default cooking days are Sunday and Wednesday. Schedule the chosen meals in your calendar now. The remaining days should be filled in with your leftovers. If you are just starting out you may not have any leftovers to pull from. That’s okay! You can start to build those up with hero meals.

Hero Meals

As you become more comfortable with your recipes you will start to realize which ones are easy to double up on for leftovers. Some meals will become so simple for you to prepare that you will have the capacity to cook two meals at once. One of these should go directly into your freezer as leftovers. You may also try tackling a complex recipe by splitting it up over multiple cooking days. For example, tamales make excellent leftovers but I rarely make them from start to finish on the same day. One cooking night I will make the mole in addition to the meal I plan to eat. Another night I may prepare the filling. Yet another night I may assemble and cook the tamales and may or may not eat them. Hero meals are about maximizing your cache of leftovers. My only caution is that you take on a hero meal only when you are comfortable with a recipe. Don’t try to hero meal plan around something you have never made before. Recipes which sounds easy up front can end up being time and labor intensive, so always try them out first before inserting them into your hero meal rotation.

Leftovers Cache

Every leftover you create should be cataloged somewhere that allows you to easily slot them into your meal planning calendar. This is why I suggest Todoist. In Todoist’s calendar view any list item that is not assigned a date can be displayed in a sidebar. This is your leftovers cache. You can then simply drag and drop a meal onto the day you plan to eat it. Ideally you will have enough variety in your leftovers that every day of the week can be a different meal. Eating a meal more than once per week is a surefire way to burn out on your own cooking.

As your leftovers cache builds up, you will likely need more freezer safe containers. I recommend investing in glass containers so that you can thaw and place your leftovers directly in the oven for reheating. The best food storage container I’ve found yet are Pyrex Ultimate because both the container and lid are freezer, dishwasher, and oven safe.

Summary

• Pick one day of the week to do your grocery shopping and use this morning to plan one week of meals.
• Select only two new meals to cook for the week unless you are planning for a hero meal.
• Establish two predictable cooking nights for every week and decline scheduling conflicts.
• Always cook for leftovers. Double recipes you are comfortable with or make a secondary hero meal which is immediately frozen.
• Catalog the contents of your freezer in Todoist so that you can drag and drag and drop your leftover meals into your weekly plan.