When you’re living alone, it’s very easy to let meal-planning fall by the wayside. It’s easy to just have a bowl of cereal or a sandwich for dinner, or to pick up something ready-made from a deli or cafe. But when we do that, we’re often compromising our health and the simple pleasure of cooking and enjoying good quality food.

Now that Mr. Science and I are living together, we decided to ensure that we plan our meals so that we’ll eat well 99% of the time. Mr. Science and I both love to cook and experiment with recipes, and between the two of us we have a beautiful collection of cookbooks. Looking through cookbooks is a guilty pleasure of mine. It’s so much fun to flip through the pages, poring over ingredients and choosing exactly which meal is the perfect one to make and enjoy.

Since Mr. Science doesn’t enjoy looking at cookbooks, we’ve made a nice arrangement: every weekend, I’ll sort through the cookbooks and find several different recipes to choose from, and then once I’ve found an assortment we’ll take a look at them together and decide which ones to make (and roughly what days we’ll have them on) for the rest of the week. That weekend we’ll do our entire grocery shopping for the week and likely make a meal or two ahead of time (for example, if one of the items is soup or stew which keeps well). And since Mr. Science has a breadmaker, we’ll make a couple loaves of bread each week too!

I’m excited to have more structure to meals from now on. Food is so important and we often don’t give it the attention it deserves. It’s also important to get good-quality ingredients, for better taste and health! I grew up having planned meals (or at least meals which include all the food groups), but I’ve noticed that these days I wind up just having a bowl of oatmeal or lots of popcorn for dinner and that kind of thing. What’s the point in having a library of cookbooks if you don’t use them?

This is our meal plan for the next week:

– Beet tartare (recipe from The New York Times Cookbook) with poached tilapia and pan con tomate.

– Corn chowder (recipe courtesy of Mr. Science) with homemade bread.

– Herb and garlic roasted baby potatoes with baked wild salmon (recipes from The Eat Clean Cookbook).

– Mac Daddy (a vegan macaroni and cheese recipe from The Veganomicon).

– Oven-fried chicken with oven-roasted potato wedges (recipes from Better Homes & Gardens).

I expect a few of these meals will last us a couple days, or else we’ll eat the leftovers for lunch.

Do you plan your meals ahead of time? What’s your favourite cookbook?