Borosilicate glass · oven to freezer 17 sets in the range 93,969 ratings across the lines
Mornings, and the afternoon dip

Breakfast and the 3pm gap

Forty minutes on a Sunday that removes two decisions a day: what to eat at seven in the morning and what to eat at three in the afternoon.

10

meals from one session

40 min

in the kitchen

20

containers in play

The two meals that get bought rather than made are breakfast and the afternoon snack, and they are bought for the same reason: they happen at moments when nobody wants to make a decision. Neither one takes any real cooking. What they take is being ready.

This is the shortest plan on the site and probably the one with the best return per minute. Forty minutes covers ten mornings and ten afternoons, and none of it involves the stove.

Step by step

The session, in order

  1. 1 0 to 15 minutes

    Oats, five at a time

    Rolled oats, milk or yoghurt, something acidic like berries, something fatty like nuts or seeds. Assembled dry in a container on Sunday and hydrated the night before, or assembled wet and left to sit.

    The wet version is better on Monday and starting to be tired by Thursday. Splitting the batch, three wet and two dry, gets a better week out of the same twenty minutes.

  2. 2 15 to 30 minutes

    Cut fruit lasts about three days, so cut three days

    Melon, pineapple, grapes and berries hold up. Apple, pear and banana brown and go soft. Citrus segments release juice that turns everything else into a slurry, so they go in their own small box.

    Two rounds of cutting, Sunday and Wednesday, produce better fruit than one round of cutting on Sunday. It is fifteen minutes twice instead of thirty once, and the Wednesday fruit is the fruit that actually gets eaten.

  3. 3 30 to 40 minutes

    Portion the things you would otherwise eat from the bag

    Nuts, crackers, dried fruit, chocolate. Straight from a bag these are not a snack, they are an open ended negotiation. In a small box they are a snack.

    This is the one job where a fifty pack of small plastic boxes is obviously the right tool. Twenty of them filled on a Sunday cover a fortnight of afternoons, and losing one at a desk costs nothing.

Worth knowing. Cut melon and berries are at their best for about three days in a fridge. If a box is still there on day four, it is a smoothie, not a snack.
What this week takes

The containers this plan is built on

Three sets, and the reason each one is here. If your household is a different size, the kit builder will scale the numbers.

Fifty small boxes: the snack job, solved for a season.

Round bowls suit oats and yoghurt better than a rectangle does.

Glass for the fruit that stays in the fridge and gets eaten at home.

Other plans

One person, weekday lunches

The five-lunch Sunday

Five lunches cooked in one go on a Sunday afternoon, eaten Monday through Friday, with nothing frozen and nothing wasted.

5 meals90 min in the kitchen5 dishes
One cook, two weeks of dinners

Cook once, freeze twice

One long cooking session that fills a fortnight. Half goes in the fridge for this week, half goes flat into the freezer for the week after.

10 meals2 hours in the kitchen10 dishes
Anyone counting, for a month

The portion reset

A fortnight of meals built around fixed compartments instead of a scale, for people who want portions to stop being a daily decision.

10 meals75 min in the kitchen5 dishes