How do I plan a week of meals without going to the store?

Start from an inventory instead of a recipe. Write down everything you have, pick the two or three heavy ingredients that can carry more than one dinner, choose recipes loose enough to bend around what you own, and cook the food that spoils first. Whatever is still missing after that is your whole shopping list.

Write down what you actually have.

Twenty minutes, three places, one list. Open the fridge, the freezer and the cupboard and write down what is in them, not what you think is in them.

Write rough quantities. "Rice" is not useful; "most of a large bag of rice" is four dinners, and "half a bag of frozen peas" is a side, not the vegetables for a week.

Mark what is close to turning, which sets the cooking order, and what has sat for months, which is what you keep buying again.

Find the anchors.

An anchor is a heavy ingredient that can carry a dinner on its own: rice or pasta, a dozen eggs, dried lentils, chicken thighs in the freezer, tofu, potatoes, four cans of tomatoes.

Count yours. One anchor is roughly two dinners before it feels repetitive, so four anchors is most of a week, and with two you are planning four days rather than seven. An anchor is not the whole meal, but the part that decides the meal exists.

Use recipes with a shape, not a list.

A recipe with a fixed ingredient list is a shopping list in disguise. A shape is a set of slots you fill from whatever the inventory holds.

Six shapes cover most weeks. Grain bowl or fried rice: grain, protein, two vegetables, something sharp. Frittata: eggs, whatever is in the fridge, cheese if there is any. Soup: onion, whatever roots exist, stock, a starch to thicken. Sheet-pan dinner: protein, hard vegetables, oil, one strong flavor. Dal or bean stew: pulses, onion, spice, fat. Pasta: pasta, one fat, one salty thing, one green thing.

Write the shape first, then fill the slots from your list: the step that turns "there is nothing to eat" into four dinners.

Write the gaps list last.

Only now, with the dinners drafted, look at what is missing. A gap is something without which a dinner does not happen: no oil, no onions, no stock, not something that would make it nicer.

Kept honest, the list is short. Something acidic, something fresh and green, and one protein if the anchors came up thin. Six things rather than forty.

Cook in the order things go bad.

The week has an order, and it is not the order you feel like. Fresh fish first, then soft leaves and berries, soft herbs, mushrooms and zucchini, then dairy and anything cooked. Hard roots, cabbage, onions and everything frozen or dried go last, because they wait.

So the salad is Monday and the lentils are Saturday, even when you want it the other way round. One exception: if something is on the edge tonight, cook it tonight, which buys time that leaving it raw does not.

The honest limits.

Protein and fresh vegetables are the two things a cupboard cannot fake, and when they are gone the week is genuinely four days rather than seven. Forcing seven is how people end up eating pasta with oil twice.

Nutrition drifts too: a week from a thin pantry leans on grains and goes light on greens and protein, fine for one week, not as a habit. Run the kitchen down on purpose, then shop properly.

And it costs attention every week: the inventory, the shapes, the order. That is what software can take off you.

SuperCook, if you want free and tonight.

You tick your ingredients and it shows recipes that use only those. It is free with no in-app purchases listed, holds 4.82 stars from 21,712 ratings, and runs on iPhone, iPad and the web.

What it does not do is the week: no plan, no gaps list, no nutrition. For step three it is useful.

A notes app, if you want free and yours.

This method was written for paper, so any notes app runs it: one note for the inventory, one for the shapes, one for the gaps. Nothing has to leave your phone, and the cost is that you do all of it every week, including the arithmetic about whether four anchors is really seven dinners.

WhatsCook.ing, if you will pay to have it done for you.

We make this one, so weigh it accordingly. You photograph the shelf instead of writing the inventory, and the week is written around it and your goals. Ingredients a recipe needs that you do not have are marked "To buy" on that recipe, and the shopping list leads with the foods that close your nutrient gaps. Every meal you cook is read nutrient by nutrient and moves a BioAge: a nutrition-derived estimate with its method shown in the app, not a medical measurement.

The limits. iPhone only, with no Android app. No free tier: the first 7 days are a free trial through your Apple Account, then $29.99 a month or $179.99 a year on the US App Store, the most expensive price on our comparison page. No grocery ordering and no barcode scanner. The questionnaire is long, the first plan takes three to four minutes, and it arrived on the App Store on 22 September 2026.

If you ask for a pantry-only week and a whole food group is missing, it writes four days instead of seven and says so first, rather than inventing ingredients you do not own.

Related pages.

Planning from what is in my fridge. The best app for one person. Which planners track nutrition, not just recipes.

Mealime closes on 21 October 2026, so members have what to use now and the longer Mealime alternative page.

Ten meal planning apps compared holds every price and rating quoted here, and the questions page answers the practical ones.

Where the figures come from.

SuperCook's price, rating and platforms are what Apple showed on the US App Store, and counts move daily.

SuperCook, Recipe By Ingredient on the App Store, read 9 September 2026.

Mealime's closing notice at mealime.com/closing, read 14 September and checked again 21 September 2026, for the 21 October 2026 closing date.

WhatsCook.ing prices and limits come from the app itself and its US App Store listing.