My young, new-to-the-city self had a simple but cost-effective weeknight cooking strategy: buy the same few ingredients every week (pasta, spinach, tomatoes, feta, frozen dumplings, sausage, yoghurt), throw a surprise item (Sweet potatoes! Cookie butter ice cream! An avocado!) into the cart, and make it all work with the rest of my pantry.
The meals were sometimes mundane, but hey, I fed myself, saved money and wasted nothing. My fridge is fuller now. But I still firmly believe that working with what you’ve got and not overbuying groceries (child-free privilege alert!) are good principles for weeknight cooking. This meal plan is dedicated to the ingredients I tend to have in my fridge, which I think of as ticking time bombs, mere days from becoming food waste. These use-them-or-lose-them ingredients, more than anything, dictate what I cook.
