We want to break out of this cycle of ordering delivery but at the same time, cooking everyday has been a challenge. We also have been trying to develop some sort of routine where we meal prep on the weekends but we live in an apartment with a really small kitchen so cooking and storing food for 5 days doesn’t seem doable. Maybe cook for 3 days and then prepare the ingredients to cook again on Wednesday?
I’d appreciate if you could share your strategies and experience. The goal here is to eat healthy and good food.
Edit: Thank you everyone for all your contributions! I am a little overwhelmed by the number of replies so I if I do not reply to you please do now feel bad!!
As someone else mentioned, decision fatigue is so real for me. Millions of recipes out there, everyone recommends cooking a given meal a bit differently, and then reviews online have further suggestions. I cook enough to follow a recipe well but not enough to know how to cut through the noise.
I started out bouncing around to all the meal delivery services when they’d offer discounts. Try it for a bit, swap to another when the discount ended, swap back when they gave me a “come back” discount. All those services come with recipe cards so I’ve kept those and curated a little recipe book with our favorites. All the info for shopping and prep is right there for me. I guess it’s like a regular recipe book with extra steps, but it sure beats what I used to do with scouring the internet for too long and trying to read my phone while cooking.
I feel that. I occasionally get myself to try something new. I’ll just keep cooking the same few things I know over and over lol. I definitely need to branch out more, and my food can get really boring to my taste buds, but I’ve survived this far! I do still tend to eat out more then I should though.
You can also create something similar with index cards and an index card holder. Whenever you find a recipe you like, write it down and put it in the card holder, preferably with some dividers for alphabetizing them. I take cards out of my recipe box and arrange them into a meal plan that I just stick to my fridge with magnets. It serves as a meal plan and grocery list all in one, since you can easily see what you will be making for the next 5-7 days or so.
It would not work for grocery shopping or sticking to the fridge like your idea, but I bought a blank recipe book and I’ve been writing in recipes I like with whatever modifications I make so it’s the version of the recipe I like and it’s great. I don’t need to do a meal plan though because I just meal prep one thing for the whole week.