Do you feel overwhelmed by food planning?
Feel you lack the skills to cook food that will delight you?
Would you like to discover your unique cooking style that can easily create meals just4You?
I don't know about you, but I'm not a planner regarding food. I rarely know what I'm having for dinner, even when walking into the kitchen to make dinner.
Even knowing what I'm going to have makes part of me feel locked down and controlled.
This planning gives me a great sense of being in control. I feel happy and calm, even when I have dozens of things I need to have done in the next few days, and others look at my calendar in horror at all the events listed.
Somehow caring for myself with food is a totally different game. The emotional five-year-old in my head screams that they don't know what they want and don't want to work it out. It's tedious planning – be spontaneous, the five-year-old voice cries!
The Best Ways to Avoiding Food Planning Overwhelm
My crazy split behaviour regarding planning has resulted in me making way too many poor food choices for dinner and not eating as well as I know I can. Plus, I've wasted money buying food on a whim, and I somehow never get around to cooking.
By connecting to my Inner Cook, I've found ways to prevent this overwhelm re cooking and I'd like to share my top 5 tips with you as I know many others face the same challenge of overwhelm in planning food.
Are You a Freestyler or a Prepper?
In my attempts to prevent food waste and eat more healthily. I found that planning was always high on the list of advice from wise ones. Still, I know that when it comes to cooking, I can go into overwhelm easily – so I either did nothing or too much and then wasted the excess I made. I also know I'm not alone. During my research and development work, I've met many others who are like me – don't like food planning.
On the other hand, I've also met so many just4Me cooks that are so good at planning their weekly meals and shopping it frightens me. Why can't I plan? The answer I've realised is that we are all different. The style of planning that works for one person will cause another to tremble with overwhelm.
Whether you're a Freestyler who creates the meal on the fly, like me or a Prepper who has a plan of what each meal is to be on each given day for the coming week, like my friend Judith. Knowing your planning style is a critical step in avoiding overwhelm.
Avoiding overwhelm comes by adjusting your planning method to match your natural style. I now don't try to plan meals. I have my kitchen set up to be stocked with the ingredients that I like to use, so I know there are always several meals ready to be made when I feel like it.
This lack of meal planning would drive a Prepper, like my friend Judith, to complete distraction as her path to avoiding overwhelm is to plan meals by day and then shop the plan each week. I now shop to replace the 'must have' ingredients rather than items for a specific dish.
I'm saving money but not buying things I don't use. I'm shopping less and in a more focused way, plus I feel more inspired about food preparation and cooking.
Food planning is a continuum with no one right style. For you, it may be a plan for the next two to three days. If so, shop to your horizon. I realised I used to do a weekly shop, ‘cos that's what you do, but I would buy enough for about two weeks as I would get inspired by random things in the supermarket that rarely go turned into meals. I thought they would be. If I'm honest, I often wasted them.
For those at the Freestyler end of the continuum, making a list of ingredients/food that I genuinely love and ensuring they are always in my pantry. I feel in control. I can be spontaneous, knowing I have the ingredients I like to play with on hand. Everything in the kitchen delights me, so there is always a great meal waiting.
Is Meal Variety the Spice of Life?
For some just4me cooks it a yes, yes, yes! But for many it's a no. I want what I know and am happy with what I cooked last night again.
My second tip to avoiding overwhelm in food prep and cooking just4You that it is important to know what you like.
Like planning, I see meal variety as a continuum. Knowing where you sit in the continuum from 'I had that last week, so I can't have it again tonight' to 'I'm ok with the same dish for five nights in a row'.
If you love the 'eat: repeat' way of menu planning, your life can be simplified by cooking once and eating the same thing often. A cook-up once a week can provide meal options to avoid overwhelm.
However, for most, cooking just for one 'eat: repeat' can be a trap, as most recipes on the web and in cookbooks are for 4-6 serves. So, we overcook and overeat.
In theory, it should be easy to divide a recipe by 4 or 6 to reduce the quantity. Somehow when you're tired and hungry on a Wednesday evening, this all seems too hard
Cooking is both an art and science.
Sometimes, it's just a simple science exercise of maths to reduce a recipe. However, there is often an art to the reduction, that is not just maths. When you're tired and hungry, it all becomes too hard, so you don't bother!
Know Your Flavours Friends
Overwhelm often comes from not knowing where to start with cooking. Is it find a recipe first? Or is it find the ingredients first? It seems all too difficult, so you don’t bother to cook.
Is it with what I feel like? Do you really know what you feel like? What cuisines you enjoy? Thai, Indian, Italian or other? More importantly, what is it about that cuisine that you like? The heat of the chillies, the tang of the fish sauce, the herby fresh smell of oregano?
By exploring my likes in-depth, I created a list of Flavour Friends that need to be always in my kitchen to add a hint of magic that creates the taste I like with basic ingredients.
A friend of mine loves the taste of Indian food. In answering these questions, she realised that she was missing two key ingredients in her pantry to make her style of Indian food. While she always had curry spices on hand, reflection revealed that coconut milk and chickpeas were essential flavours that she liked but didn't regularly use.
She now keeps her magic ingredients on hand and can always make a dish that, to her, is the taste of India. Cooking just4me is about your taste, not trying to create what others say a dish should be like.
Knowing your flavour friends, be it a sauce, chutney or spice can avoid overwhelm, allowing you to create a dish to delight your tastebuds easily, with just few essential ingredients.
Cooking Style: Active v Passive
Another way to overcome food planning overwhelm is by being very clear on what cooking styles you enjoy and those you don't like.
I've learnt that I don't like cooking styles that require me to be constantly doing things; stir frying, for example. You have to chop and then add each ingredient one by one and stir constantly. This is not what my Inner Cook enjoys. My Inner Cook is a set-and-forget cook. Happy to do a bit of prep, then into the oven /casserole/ slower cooker and sometime later, a beautiful meal appears. I don't want to keep touching, turning, and poking my food as it is cooking.
There are many, many others out there who like to be very hands-on with cooking. That is the joy of cooking for them. I call them Active cooks – always doing stuff to the meal while it's cooking. I know one who hates her air fryer, as she can't see what's happening and keeps opening it to check.
Me? I put my food in, set the timer and go off and do something else till the meal is done. – I call myself a Passive cook.
Like with planning and menu variety there is no one way. It's a continuum, and we all are somewhere along the scale. Where we sit will determine what style of cooking, we are comfortable with and find easy and what stresses us.
To avoid overwhelm, go with what you naturally enjoy. I don't stir fry or fry foods in any form, even though I love the taste of fried foods. It's my go-to meal when eating out. This may shock many, for whom frying is their go-to way of preparing food.
This clarity of cooking style preference simplifies my choice of the way I like to prepare a meal, thus avoiding overwhelm.
Create a Manual for Your Inner Cook
Writing your own recipe book is my final way of avoiding planning overwhelm.
Breath! I'm talking about a small notebook in which you keep a handwritten version of your favourite meals, sized just for you, and indexed so you can quickly find a meal that delights your tastebuds, made in the style you enjoy, using ingredients that you have on hand. Not a fancy published book. I call my little book The Manual for My Inner Cook.
I write in my book on days I'm inspired, full of energy and create a great meal, be it an invention or a scaling down of a family recipe. Then on days, I feel it's all too much, I can flick through The Manual, to find a recipe of a dish that: I like, won't make an excessive amount, and is made with ingredients I like and have my pantry. Overwhelm avoided!
I trust you find these tips helpful. They are some of the most popular ones from The Power of Connecting to Your Inner Cook course and are ones I use every day to be a healthier, happier version of me.