I cycle through over 150 recipes, so I'll bulk cook and eat one recipe a few time in one week, but won't have it again for nearly a year.
That sounds like a good way to operate! Thanks for the feedback.
I use the Paprika app, select a few recipes for the week based on the cross references ingredients, and then the program generates a shipping list for me.
The key is knowing what kind of recipes are cheap to make, so an African curry where the bulk of the dish is kidney beans, canned tomatoes, and rice, is going to cost well under $1/serving.
Interesting. I will check it out. I assume the shipping list does not factor in the inventory that you already have in your pantry right?
Like, an app that tracks your pantry inventory? I'm not sure how that would even work.
It takes me no time to check quickly what I don't need from the list. That's part of the 5 minutes. Once you get used to doing it, it's also a lot easier to track what you have and what you need.
@Malcat you turned me onto Paprika and...it actually does track your pantry inventory, if you want it to. I mean, you have to maintain it yourself (you can't type in that you made black bean soup and have it automatically erase a pound of dried beans from your pantry).
I tried for about 2 weeks, and it was too much of a pain. I have to say, I have not managed your level of efficiency in using Paprika. I do use it a LOT - most of my meals come from whatever we get in our CSA boxes each week, so it's great for looking up recipes for, say, eggplant or sweet potatoes or beets when you are tired of the same old same old.
We eat a lot of salad, kale chips, and zoodles this time of year.
I was using an old version. I didn't know about the inventory option, and there's no way I would bother manually updating that.
Using it really efficiently does take a bit of upfront investment in terms of categorizing the recipes.
I have them categorized by type: curry, soup, noodles, casserole, salad, sauce, etc. And I have the categorized in terms of ingredients that come in volumes that don't work for one recipe. So if I want to do a recipe with feta, I'll do another recipe either the same week or the next that calls for feta because I'll buy a big tub at costco. Same with cabbage, or cauliflower, etc, where a recipe almost always calls for a half of one.
So I have to manually categorize each recipe when I upload it to make the app the most useful, but that's like a minute of extra work for each recipe, and it makes planning incredibly easy.
So I'll think that this week I want to make a soup, a curry, a potato dish, and a salad. There's a potato kale dish I like that requires feta, so I'll look for a salad that also uses feta. I know the potato dish also calls for fresh oregano, so I'll grab a soup recipe that I know also needs it. The salad uses cilantro, and a bunch is probably too much, so I'll make sure to grab a curry recipe that needs cilantro.
And like that I have a bulk cooking meal plan and a zero waste shopping list.
Because I've put in the work to set it up, I barely have to think about anything.
