Tired of scrabbling around for last-minute dinner ideas and throwing away unused perishables? These 10 tips will get you properly organised

If it’s Monday it must be moussaka: how meal-planning can save you stress and money

Kate Turner is aware that the chalkboard meal-planner in her Sussex kitchen can bewilder visitors. “Friends come round and go: ‘Wow, my God!’,” says the author of My Zero-Waste Kitchen. That breakfast, lunch and dinner wallchart (Wednesday: porridge; Dad’s salad; pilaf; Thursday: cereal, tuna sandwiches; spinach pie) may look overwhelming, but Turner insists: “It’s not scary. Not having to think about what you’re cooking is liberating. It saves money, time and stress.”

Meal-planning has a way to go before it becomes mainstream, but it has long been a hit with weight-loss experts and wellness gurus, and the growing desire to cut food waste has led to a new wave of interest.

True, using every scrap of your shopping across purposefully planned meals is a habit you have to develop. But whether you cook complex dishes from scratch every night or are more of a pasta-and-sauce person, to Turner, planning makes unbeatable ecological and financial sense. “If you’re wasting food, you’re wasting money,” she says. “I’m really keen this isn’t seen as a middle-class hobby. It’s a money-saver for anybody.”

But where do you start? Here are 10 tips from experts.

Plan your week in food

Whether you use a Google doc, a spreadsheet, a magnetic fridge whiteboard or a simple notepad, you first need to setup a seven-day planner that you can easily edit – one week being a reasonable timeframe in which to use fresh ingredients before they spoil. If you prefer, there are apps (Yummly, SideChef, Smart Recipes) that can help you pick meals and recipes and generate shopping lists.

Make it enjoyable, urges the chef Miguel Barclay, the author of One Pound Meals: “You don’t have to start on Monday. Start on Friday night’s curry if that’s the meal you look forward to most, or Sunday roast if that’s non-negotiable. If cooking’s not exciting, in six months you’ll be back on takeaways.”

Allow for real life

A meal plan should not dictate your life. As you plan, jot down what you are doing each day (meeting mates for a drink after work, picking the kids up late from football) and think about what time you have to cook, if at all. Working across seven days gives you flexibility. You can stay late in the pub or order a takeaway on a whim without creating disastrous waste. “I can’t be rigid about it,” says Turner. “Work and family life don’t allow for that. If meals get shunted around the week, that’s fine.”

Find your MO

Food offers infinite possibilities. To write a quick meal plan, you need to narrow them down, establishing a framework that works for you. You might start by choosing three meats a week, from a whole chicken to a pack of bacon, then select recipes that use those meats across two or three different meals. Or you might be led by leftovers: select three main meals you love, then choose recipes for the other days that use up any raw or cooked remants. Cooking dinner plus an extra portion for lunch at work the next day is a third way to minimise cost and waste. “That way you only have to plan seven dinners and two lunches each week, on Saturday and Sunday, which simplifies everything,” says Limahl Asmall, the author of Tiny Budget Cooking.

In choosing meats, think about leftovers. You can use cold roast beef as pie filling or in a sandwich but, arguably, it’s less user-friendly than leftover roast chicken, which can be used shredded in stir-fries, or in soups and salads.

Another useful discipline is to stick to one type of cuisine each week (Indian, Italian, Chinese), so you don’t end up having to use leftover pak choi in a lasagne. “If you do Thai on Tuesday and pizza on Wednesday, you’ll have waste,” says Rachel Beckwith, the family editor at BBC Good Food magazine.

Embrace the internet

“Whatever I’ve got left over from my last dish, I use as the first piece of the jigsaw for my next recipe,” says Barclay, a pro chef with a vast mental Rolodex of ideas to draw on. But where should the rest of us look for inspiration? “Type ‘leftover chicken recipes’ into Google,” he suggests. “There’s the 10 best leftover chicken recipes, pictures, everything. There is no secret to finding recipes: just type it into Google, pick one, move on. Google are trying to make driverless cars. Do you not think they moved on to that after they sorted out the leftover-chicken recipes?”

Build a staples cupboard

It needn’t be huge, but put together a store cupboard of basic carbs (dried pasta, lentils, rice); flavourings (soy sauce, stock cubes, dry herbs, spices); tins (pulses, tomatoes, tuna); and frozen veg, such as peas. You will be ready to tackle most planned meals.

Check your fridge before you shop

According to Love Food Hate Waste, 30% of people don’t; almost half of us forget to check the freezer; and 44% of 18 to 34-year-olds go shopping without making a list.

Browsing online can be helpful by showing you pack sizes as you write your meal plan, but deliveries can often include short-dated products or already ripe fruit that you need to speed-eat, disrupting that plan. Instead, shop in person, ideally somewhere you can weigh out the ingredients you need. Write your shopping list in a rough date order as a reminder to buy items with a longer sell-by date that you plan to use later in the week.

Choose any deals wisely, warns Beckwith. “It’s a false economy if you buy something two-for-one and it goes bad in the fridge. Supermarkets want you to pay for that wastage.”

Buy big, versatile flavours

“Chorizo and bacon are perfect examples,” says Barclay. “A little goes a long way, whereas something like steak is very poor value.”

Treat yourself early in the week

Use prime ingredients with a short shelf-life early, as through the week you will accumulate leftovers that require retooling – into a sausage, tomato and cabbage chilli pasta, say, or a one-pot stew. “I use more curries and bolognese-type recipes at the end of the week, where it doesn’t show if a courgette’s gone past its best. It’s more forgiving, especially things with spices,” says Beckwith.

The freezer is your friend

A well-organised freezer is the bedrock of minimal-waste meal planning. It allows you to save most leftovers or tired, withering items (bananas, pureed fruits, chopped onions and garlic, herbs blitzed into a pesto etc), and maintain a stash of meals to fall back on when you are too busy or cannot be mithered cooking.

How you store things is a matter of taste and budget (reusable zip-lock bags, Tupperware, recycled plastic takeaway containers), but clearly label everything, including the date frozen and ideal use-by date, which will usually be within three months.

Make the most of the weekend

“An hour or two of prep each weekend (making meals for the freezer or, perhaps cooking mince that you can turn into a shepherd’s pie) will make it far more likely that you stick to your meal plan during the week.

A warning: test any recipes before you XXL them. Making a huge vat of revolting veggie chilli for the freezer that you reluctantly trudge through over several weeks will definitely erode your enthusiasm for this whole meal-planning malarkey.