This is one of our first meal plans after transitioning to a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle.
Plant-based meal plans are an effective way to control your schedule and food budget. Never a big planner myself, I have learned to embrace this practice more recently. Planning your meals in advance can help give structure to your week and ensure that you go through all of your produce before it goes to waste. When you plan ahead, it’s easy to make meals that might otherwise have seemed too time consuming or complicated.
Our Best Plant-Based Meal Plan Tips
- Be flexible. Once you make a menu, you don’t need to rigidly adhere to it every night of the week. Stuff happens; you just need to have a general idea of what you’ll be making.
- Start small. Just plan a few days ahead. The most I ever plan for in advance is one week.
- Inventory your fridge and pantry as you write your list. Use what you have so you don’t need to make any special shopping trips. Keep in mind what you need to go through before it goes bad.
- Plan for a leftover night. Or two! It’s like giving yourself a night off from the kitchen!
- Make it fun! Josh and I like to write our meal plans on Sunday nights before we start a new week. Believe it or not, it is actually a really nice way to wind down at the end of the day and bond. Since cooking is one of our favorite things to do together, we keep our menus interesting with some old standards and a few new ones to try for the first time.
- Always shop with a list. Without one, it’s really east to end up with too much — or too little — of what you need.
Our Plant-Based Meal Plan From This Week
| Day | Meal | Foods to go through |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | Root Vegetable Buddha Bowl | beets, sweet potatoes, sugar snap peas, carrots |
| Monday | Swiss Chard Pasta | swiss chard, lemons |
| Tuesday | Caribbean Quinoa Bowl | kale, mango, avocado |
| Wednesday | Josh's Five Minute Salad | avocado, tomatoes, green onions, mixed greens |
| Thursday | Collard-ritos | collard greens, avocado, tomatoes, cilantro |
| Friday | Cold Soba Noodle Salad | cucumber, red bell pepper, mango, avocado |
| Saturday | Buddha Bowl | zucchini (yellow and green), green onions, carrots, left-over rice |
This was Sunday’s dinner, a root vegetable Buddha Bowl with sugar snap peas, beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, peppers and corn, topped with fresh basil and balsamic vinegar.
If you’re in need of meal-planning ideas, a great resource is The China Study Quick & Easy Cookbook by Del Sroufe. A plant-based cookbook with several sample meal plans and shopping lists, it also gives you instructions on making a week’s worth of food at once to enjoy throughout the week!