How do I plan meals so ingredients get used up?

Most meal plans are lists of dishes, and a list of dishes generates a shopping list of single-use ingredients — a bunch of coriander for one curry, a tub of crème fraîche for one sauce, half a savoy cabbage. This method inverts the process. You choose the ingredients first and let the meals fall out of them, which is why the fridge is empty on Saturday rather than half full of things that have gone soft.

Step by step

1. Start with what already has to be used.Open the fridge, the freezer and the vegetable rack and write down everything with a short life left. That list goes into the plan before a single meal is chosen. Planning first and looking second is how the same three items get thrown away every week.
2. Pick two anchor ingredients.Usually one protein and one substantial vegetable, chosen because they come in a pack larger than one meal — a whole chicken, a pack of mince, a large squash, a bag of spinach, a kilo of potatoes. These are the ingredients you will deliberately spread across the week.
3. Build two or three meals from each anchor.A chicken becomes a roast, then a curry or pie from the leftover meat, then stock. A pack of mince becomes a bolognese and a chilli. A bag of spinach goes into a dal on Monday and an omelette on Thursday. You are not eating the same meal — you are finishing the same pack.
4. Draw the grid.Meals down one side, ingredients across the top, a mark where a meal uses an ingredient. It takes five minutes on the back of an envelope and it makes the waste obvious — the columns with one mark are your future bin contents.
5. Deal with every single-use fresh item.For each column with only one mark, choose: find a second use for it this week, buy it loose or in the smallest quantity, substitute something you already have, or drop that meal. Herbs, cream, soft cheese, salad leaves and specialist vegetables are the usual offenders.
6. Plan one fewer meal than there are evenings.Leave one deliberate gap. Something will produce leftovers, or an evening will not go to plan, and a plan with no slack collapses on Wednesday and takes the rest of the week with it. The gap is what the leftovers fill.
7. Order the meals by perishability, not by appeal.Fish and salad early in the week, root vegetables and frozen items late. Cook the things that spoil first, first. This one change removes a surprising proportion of household food waste on its own.
8. Write the shopping list from the grid.Column by column, with quantities, checking each against what you already have. Buying to a grid rather than to a list of dishes is what produces the whole-pack usage.
9. Keep a small set of no-shopping meals in reserve.Two or three things you can make entirely from cupboard and freezer. They are what you cook when the plan fails, instead of a takeaway or a second shop.

Tips

• Herbs are the single worst offender. Buy a pot rather than a bag, or freeze what is left in oil in an ice cube tray the day it arrives rather than the day it wilts.
• Keep one shelf as a 'use first' shelf at eye level, and put anything approaching its limit on it. It costs nothing and it works.
• A grid built once can be reused. Four or five stored weekly grids that you rotate is far less effort than planning from scratch every Sunday.
• This is a waste method more than a cost method — the saving comes from what you stop throwing away rather than from what you pay at the till.

Common mistakes

• Choosing seven recipes you fancy and shopping for them — Each recipe brings its own single-use ingredients, so you buy seven part-packs and use seven fractions of them. It is the standard way to plan and it is the main mechanism by which households waste food.
• Planning a meal for every evening — There is no room for leftovers, for a late night, or for anything unexpected, so the plan breaks and the surplus food is wasted. Plan four or five for seven evenings.

If it doesn't work

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