rolling meals

you don't have to cook full meals every day & you don't have to eat the same meal over & over

i’m far from the first person to talk about this. tamar adler talks about it in an everlasting meal as i keep yammering about in every other post. also, cooking youtuber ethan chlebowski talks about it especially here and here (these are videos if you’re a video person)

but you don’t have to choose between spending a couple of hours every night making several dishes, or getting take out/fast food, or eating the same meal over & over again

i am going to give a quick example of how a rolling meal cooking schedule can work. for the purposes of this post i’m going to assume you eat three meals & no snacks, work from home & have a flexible schedule, but don’t necessarily have a ton of time to cook

day one:

• breakfast: scrambled eggs & toast

• lunch: make a couple cups of vinaigrette & use some to dress green salad with rinsed canned cannellini beans & canned sardines

• dinner: rotisserie chicken or marcella hazan’s incredibly easy chicken with two lemons (whether you make or buy the chicken, make sure you get enough for leftovers), chopped tomato with lunch’s vinaigrette, & mashed potatoes (boil a few extra potatoes & put them in the fridge (unmashed))

day two:

• breakfast: chop a leftover boiled potato & fry it up for home fries. with eggs

• lunch: with the leftover chicken, make enough chicken salad for a couple of meals, eat a chicken salad sandwich with maybe some of those salad greens & a nice slice of tomato that you saved for today’s sandwich from last night. throw the chicken bones in a slow cooker or a pot on low heat, cover with water, now you’re making the world’s easiest broth

• dinner: make a stir fry & rice—chop more vegetables than you plan on using & make extra rice. turn off the slow cooker/stove from earlier & get that broth in the fridge!

day three:

• breakfast: oatmeal & yogurt, don’t worry you’ll get your eggs later

• lunch: fried rice with yesterday’s rice, an egg, & any meat or vegetable bits you have around that wanna be used

• dinner: straciatella soup, which is basically italian egg drop soup. beat lots of grated parmesan into an egg or two & drizzle them into hot homemade chicken broth. eat it with some buttered bread &, a little green salad or chopped tomatoes or cucumbers, dressed with your homemade vinaigrette. before you go to bed, rinse a pound of dry beans (think black, pinto) & leave them to soak in salted water

day four:

• breakfast: more eggs & home fries. now you’ve used up your last cold boiled potato. rinse your beans & start cooking them in a slow cooker or a pot over low heat, maybe in water maybe in broth, maybe fry a little garlic or onion first to cook with the beans

• lunch: another chicken salad sandwich, this time you don’t even have to make the chicken salad

• dinner: your beans are ready. make some salsa & rice (extra rice!), eat your beans with that & some sour cream

day five:

• breakfast: tamago kake gohan/tkg. reheat your leftover rice very hot (microwaving it with a little water works great), stir an egg into that with chopsticks & let the hot rice cook the egg to a creamy carbonara consistency, then dress with soy sauce & maybe a chopped green onion

• lunch: the last of your chicken broth with miso & lots of silken tofu, green onions, & wakame (a seaweed which lasts forever dry in your pantry & cooks very easily), maybe a handful of spinach in there or frozen peas, or any of those chopped raw vegetables you have leftover from your stir fry

• dinner: cook a few chicken thighs with this recipe, make some chicken tacos with last night’s beans & salsa, save half the thighs for later

day six:

• breakfast: poach eggs in your leftover beans & eat them with tortillas

• lunch: another one of those green salads with sardines, canned beans, & vinaigrette

• dinner: make more than enough of marcella hazan’s 3 ingredient tomato sauce. make some spaghetti & dress it with the sauce & some parmesan. your vegetable is chopped cucumbers with vinaigrette

day seven:

• breakfast: picnic breakfast! today you get to go to the park & enjoy a very nice piece of cheese with butter & jam & bread

• lunch: the same chicken tacos you had for dinner on day five, only this time you don’t have to cook anything, just assemble

• dinner: use the leftover tomato sauce to make eggs in purgatory/shakshouka

this is pretty loose advice. i haven’t given you a shopping list for it or recipes for most of the dishes. there are a few repeat meals & one meal actually is just leftovers

but i think there’s a good amount of variety & it’s all pretty healthy. & there’s never a ton of complicated cooking at once. in general what i really hope this post does for you, is help you think about how rolling meals could work in your own kitchen, to meet your own needs. for instance, you don’t have to actually cook every meal you eat for this to be helpful, you can incorporate takeout leftovers into the rolling meal schedule, you can adjust it to your dietary needs, you don’t have to eat eggs literally every day, etc etc etc