How to Plan Dinners Without Cooking Every Night

A RealPlate week comes with five dinners on it, which suits plenty of weeks and not all of them. A flexible night is simply one you've left empty on purpose – you're out, or eating late, or you just don't fancy cooking on a Thursday. The plan still shops properly for the nights you are cooking, and the total comes down to match.

Most flexible nights don't need a plan

Plenty of them don't need a recipe at all: eggs on toast, a baked potato, pasta with whatever's in the fridge, or a takeaway you'd rather decide on the night. None of that needs a shopping list, which is rather the point of leaving the night open.

What does help is naming the night in advance, even loosely. It keeps the shopping list honest, so you're not buying ingredients for meals you were never going to cook – and because the list is costed as a week rather than as five separate recipes, dropping a night changes the total properly. You can also add a short note to a flexible night – "leftovers", "pizza", "out" – so the plan still tells you something when you come back to it midweek.

If there are leftovers

Whether there's anything spare depends on how many of you are eating, but when there is, a flexible night is where it goes. Each recipe carries a note on keeping and reheating: whether it freezes, how it's best warmed through, and which dishes are honestly better eaten fresh. When you know a flexible night is coming, that tells you which Monday dinner is worth cooking with Thursday in mind.

Some weeks you'll cook all five, and that's what the default is there for. The point isn't that fewer dinners is better, it's that the plan should fit the week you're actually having, and still give you a shopping list that works.