How to decide what to cook this week in about a minute

The question "what should I cook this week?" feels like a recipe problem. You answer it by looking for recipes, find eleven thousand of them, and end up ordering in.

It is not a recipe problem. There is no shortage of recipes and there never has been. It is a decision problem, and decisions are made worse by more options, not better.

Here is a method that takes about a minute, works with or without an app, and survives contact with a Wednesday.

Start with how many nights you will actually cook

Not seven. Almost nobody cooks seven.

Be honest and pick the real number — for most people it is three or four. There is a night with leftovers, a night something runs late, a night that turns into toast, a night out.

This one step does most of the work, because a seven-day plan that fails on Wednesday feels like failure, and a four-day plan that succeeds feels like competence. The plans are nearly identical. The difference is what you told yourself you were doing.

Plan four. Anything more is a bonus.

Then shortlist, don't search

The mistake is opening a recipe site. You are not short of recipes; you are short of a decision, and a search box makes deciding harder by adding options.

Choose instead from things you have already decided you want at some point: the videos you saved, the meals you cook well, the two or three you have been meaning to try. That set is small, pre-approved by you, and has the enormous advantage of already being interesting to you.

If you have no such set, start one now — it takes a fortnight of tapping save to build something genuinely useful, and it will keep paying out for years.

Assign meals to nights, not to days

A recipe does not care which day it is. Your Tuesday does.

Sort your shortlist by how long each takes, then match them to the shape of the week:

Two rules make this much easier than it sounds. Put the fresh things early in the week — anything with fish, soft herbs or salad leaves should be eaten in the first two or three days after a shop. And put the ambitious thing on the night you are actually home, because a recipe you are looking forward to is a recipe you will cancel if it lands on the wrong evening.

Then shop once, against the plan

This is the step that turns a plan into fewer decisions rather than more.

Write the full list from the four recipes together, not one recipe at a time. Combine anything that repeats. Order it by where things sit in the shop, so you walk it once.

If you do this by hand, the two things that will bite you are duplicates ("garlic" written twice because two recipes wanted it) and order (walking back for the herbs). Both are annoying enough by the third week to end the habit, which is a problem worth understanding properly before you blame yourself for not sticking with it.

Why this works, when "meal planning" so often doesn't

Meal planning has a reputation as a virtuous chore, filed next to budgeting and flossing. That framing is why people bounce off it.

What is actually happening is much less worthy. You are moving about twenty small decisions — what, when, do we have it, is there time, should we just order — out of the evenings, where you are tired and the delivery app is one tap away, and into a single minute on a Saturday when you are not.

That is the entire mechanism. You are not becoming a more organised person. You are just deciding at a better time.

Deciding once on Saturday is not more discipline than deciding five times during the week. It is considerably less.

Two consequences follow, and they are the reason it sticks:

• You cook more of what you already wanted. The plan is drawn from your own

shortlist, so nothing on it is a compromise.

• The shop gets smaller. Four planned meals bought together cost less and

waste less than four unplanned meals bought separately, mostly because you stop buying a second bunch of coriander.

Doing it without a plan at all

If a week feels like too much, a smaller version genuinely works: decide tomorrow's dinner tonight.

One decision, made twelve hours before you are hungry rather than at the moment you are, is most of the benefit for almost none of the effort. It also breaks the specific failure where you open the fridge at 6:40 and discover the meal you had in mind needed something to be defrosted.

Where an app helps, and where it doesn't

An app cannot decide for you what kind of week you are having. It cannot know your mother is visiting Thursday.

What it can do is the mechanical part, and the mechanical part is most of the minute: keeping the shortlist, matching times to nights, not repeating what you had last week, and turning four recipes into one correct list.

That is what FasterChef does. It takes the cooking videos you already saved from Instagram and TikTok, turns them into real recipes, and generates three, four or seven days from them — respecting what you do not eat and how long you have on a weeknight — then writes a single shopping list with the duplicates merged and the rows sorted by aisle. You lock the nights you like and regenerate the rest.

There is more on why the week should plan itself, and on why the saved folder never turns into dinner without something doing this work.

But the method above works with a notebook. Start there if you like — the app is only the part that saves you the minute.