How to plan a week of dinners in 15 minutes

Minutes 0 to 2: look at the week ahead

Open your calendar before you open a single recipe. The number of dinners you will actually cook at home is rarely seven. Late meetings, after-school activities, a meal out with friends or a night of leftovers all take a slot away.

• Count the nights you will cook from scratch. For most households this lands at four or five.
• Mark the one or two evenings that need a very quick dinner, ready in about 30 minutes.
• Keep one night free for leftovers or something from the freezer. It gives the plan room to bend.
• Note who is eating each night, so you plan the right number of servings.

Minutes 2 to 4: set your rules once

A lot of planning time goes into remembering the same things every week: who is vegetarian, who cannot eat nuts, who picks the mushrooms out. Write these rules down once and stop rebuilding them from memory.

In Suppercharge you set them when you sign up: your diet type, any allergies or ingredients you avoid, the foods you dislike and your usual number of servings. Every suggestion after that already fits, so there is nothing to filter out by hand. If you are unsure which diet type suits your household, browse the recipes by diet to see what each one includes.

Minutes 4 to 9: pick the meals

This is where most people lose time, scrolling through ideas without committing to any of them. Give yourself a simple formula and choose inside it.

• One dinner you know everyone enjoys.
• One new recipe, to keep the week interesting.
• One very fast meal for your busiest night.
• One or two meals that share fresh ingredients with the others, such as a bunch of herbs, a bag of spinach or half a cabbage.

That last point is what saves money. If two dinners both use cilantro, you buy one bunch and finish it. The automatic builder in Suppercharge does this matching for you. Tell it how many meals you want, from one to seven, and it suggests a set of recipes that share fresh ingredients, along with a food waste score that shows how much of the fresh produce you buy gets fully used. If the plan does not appeal, swipe for another, or swap a single meal and keep the rest.

Prefer to choose every meal yourself? Browse the recipe catalogue, add the dinners you like to your plan and set the servings for each one.

Minutes 9 to 12: make one grocery list

With the meals chosen, the shopping list is the part that tends to go wrong on paper. Recipes list ingredients in cooking order rather than shopping order, and the same onion can show up in three recipes in three different amounts.

1. Combine duplicates. Two recipes that each need half an onion means one onion on the list.
2. Group items the way the store is laid out, so you walk each aisle once.
3. Cross off anything already in your kitchen. Check the fridge and cupboards for oil, rice, garlic and spices.
4. Add the extras the dinners do not cover, like milk, coffee and lunch supplies.

Suppercharge builds this list from your plan automatically, adding up amounts and sorting each item into its aisle. Mark anything you already own with "I already have this", and type your own extras into the same list so there is only one thing to carry to the store.

Minutes 12 to 15: give each meal a night

A list of meals is helpful. A list with days attached is a plan. Put the quickest recipe on your busiest evening, and cook dishes with delicate ingredients, such as fish, salad leaves or fresh herbs, early in the week while they are at their best. Heartier dishes built on root vegetables, squash, cabbage or canned beans can wait until the weekend.

In the week view of your plan, pick a day for each meal, or leave a few unscheduled if your week is hard to predict. When you finish a dinner, mark it as cooked so you can see at a glance what is left.

Make next week even faster

The first plan takes the full fifteen minutes. After that it gets quicker, because you reuse the decisions you have already made.

• Rate each meal after you cook it, so the good ones are easy to find again.
• Save the hits as favourites and build next week's plan around them.
• Set a weekly reminder. Suppercharge can nudge you to plan on the same day and at the same time each week, by notification or by email, from Settings.
• Start next week's plan before this one ends, so you can shop for both in one trip if that suits you.

If someone else shares the cooking, they can work from the same plan and grocery list. Household sharing is part of Suppercharge Pro; planning, the grocery list and cooking mode are free.