Methods of meal planning & grocery lists

I have a meal planner/ financial book by Life&Apples..3rd year buying the same one. 🤓 I have a master grocery list on my phone i can ✔️ and uncheck as needed.

I've been cooking for over 50 years, which is a lot of practice, and these days it's cooking for one so I only have myself to please. It's pretty easy.

I use what I'd call a "pantry method" of shopping and meal planning. I have many basic items and ingredients that I always keep on hand, including shelf-stable, refrigerated and frozen. If I were forced to, I could stay alive for weeks on only those things, if not necessarily optimally nourished the whole time.

Once a week or so, I go buy fresh items like veggies, fruits, proteins. I'm vegetarian, so most of my proteins aren't quick to spoil. When I shop, I restock any pantry items as needed.

I don't meal plan. When it's getting to meal time, I think about fresh items on hand, pick one(s) I want to feature in that meal, and use pantry supplies to cook them, using patterns rather than strict recipes. Example patterns: Sandwich, enchilada, soup/stew, tostada, casserole bake, etc.

My shopping list these days is in a generic checklist app on my phone. It contains all the items I routinely buy, plus I add any special one-time items. When I buy the things, I cross them off the list. When it's time to restock them again, I uncross them off again when I notice I'm low/out of the thing. At the store, the app lets me sort the list by status, which puts the not-crossed-off things at the top. I buy them, cross them off again.

Because of how this works, it doesn't matter how big the list is. (There's a text search function, so I don't have to scroll to uncross-off things I need.) That means I can put rarely-purchased items with hard-to-remember details on the list and keep them there, crossed off, such as the size button battery I need for my scales, the size of bulbs for various lamps, etc.

I use an app to keep track of everything in my two small freezers (pantrist). Other than that: I have a supermarket around the corner, and some 8 more supermarkets within walking distance and lots of small specialized shops. Thus if I need something I can get it. Unless it's Sunday or a public holiday.

Otherwise I prefer the chaos method. I often get fruit and veg surprise bags and cook with whatever's in there. I have about 120 cookbooks and use eatyourbooks to find recipes for the ingredients I have.

Yes, I have various sources for that. Either a Too good to go fruit and veg bags (a Turkish cornershop that participates, various quality), a supermarket offers an 8kg parcel once per week per mail, and another supermarket chain has rescue bags that might contain 5-8 types of fruit and veg for 3 EUR, of which they donate something to a local pantry. It just makes cooking a lot more interesting, plus I get smaller amounts of produce that I'd otherwise not get.

In the US, in some places you can get veggie/fruit boxes from a multi-crop farm, a farmers market, or similar source. Same kind of idea: Surprise items. How diverse/surprising depends on the source, as does pricing.

Here, among others, a local community center that runs a farmers market once a week also has a veggie box program, or so they call it. It actually includes things like fruits, herbs, sometimes even mushrooms in addition to veggies, and they tuck in recipes, too. I know less about it, but the local university's student organic farm has a similar type of program.

Usually, it's subscription based. I've not joined because the amounts are a little large for me as a solo diner even though I'm a big veggie/fruit consumer, plus it's a great joy to me to actually go to the famers market or organic farm's sales and pick out my own new things to try, or old favorites.

I got a 3 EUR rescue bag today. I got 500g spinach, 500g strawberries, a small bag of mint, 3 colours of bellpeppers and small stuff (pear, plum, few carrots). Good value.