I try to grocery shop once a week and pickup whatever looks good or fresh that I can use in a variety of meals throughout the week. My goal is to buy a small amount of higher quality things that I can use in 2-3 meals.

Lately though I’ve just been going to the store when I want to make something and it’s much more stressful that way. I need to get back into doing more planning.

Not really, I can’t tell what I’d like to eat more than 2-3 days forward. I won’t eat what I don’t want to so it’s not that easy

I don’t, I really wish I did more, but I’ve found it a difficult habit to develop and keep up with for some reason, although I have tried several times.

One of the most successful methods I’ve had was with my sous vide cooker. I would go to Costco (/Sam’s Club/BJ’s/whatever bulk goods store) and buy a variety of meat, couple packs of steaks, pork chops, chicken, etc. Once home I would season and portion the meat out into individual servings, then vacuum seal and freeze. Before work every morning I’d throw a frozen protein in the water bath and go to work, which was only 5 minutes away from home, at lunch time I’d clock out, rush home, quickly sear my whatever was cooking and add a can of vegetables or some other leftover for a side. Was a phenomenal system, but only lasted a few months before the job ended, and just haven’t tried to pick up the habit again.

At one point I set up Mealie, a self-hosted recipe tracker/scraper that worked well and helped to generate some grocery lists. That was nice because I was able to select different things I wanted to make over the course of a week and have it generate a list of what I need ingredient wise.

However I never really “stuck with it” as a habit. Mealie is really cool in that it can (theoretically) scrape recipes out of other websites, so it centralizes your recipes and strips the “blog” fluff out of them. But in practice it wasn’t great at doing that, it relied on very specific metadata tags that just aren’t present/formatted properly in a lot of recipe blogs, so it wound up being more trouble to use than it’s worth. If I were more dedicated I might be willing to manually transcribe the recipes, but I ain’t lol.

Anyways, apologies, I realize that’s kinda ranty and doesn’t really answer your question. I’m posting partially cause I hope other people will share their meal-prep-planning and I can steal ideas haha.