Printable Meal Prep Planner (Free PDF)

This is a planner for the cooking session itself, not for the week's menu. The top table takes ten dishes and asks four things about each one: how many portions it makes, how many containers you need, which days it covers and how to reheat or freeze it. Filling that in before you shop is what stops the familiar Sunday problem of four trays of the same thing and nothing to put it in.

Underneath, a prep order checklist gives you eight blank lines with tick boxes, for the sequence that makes a two-hour session fit into one: rice on, oven to temperature, trays in, chop while they roast. At the foot of the page the shopping list runs in three columns headed produce, protein, dairy and eggs, and pantry, frozen and other, with nine checkbox lines in each.

Everything is fillable: the cook date, the time you have, the number of people, every table cell, every prep step and every shopping line. Type the plan on screen and print it for the kitchen, where it will get splashed and that is fine, or print it blank and write as you go. The checkboxes are real PDF boxes, so a shopping list ticked off on a phone in the supermarket works as well as one on paper. One page, US Letter or A4.