Cria Planner
Meal planning
Never plan from scratch: reuse last week's meals
Meal planning doesn't fail because it's hard. It fails because people do the hard version: a blank page, every single week, forever. Once you've had a few weeks that worked, the clever move is to stop inventing and start copying. Here's how to build a small rotation and reuse it in a couple of taps, with a completely clear conscience.
You already eat on rotation. Admit it.
Ask any household to list every dinner they cooked in the last two months and you'll get somewhere between ten and fifteen distinct meals, and a slightly defensive look. That's not a failure of imagination. It's how people eat. A rotation is efficient: you know the recipes, you know the shopping, you know who picks the mushrooms out. Fighting it with a brand-new menu every week just turns dinner into homework.
A rotation is really a habit wearing an apron, and habits are built by repetition in a stable context, not by novelty. In the study that gave us the honest numbers on this, the behaviours that became automatic were the ones repeated the same way in the same situation, and the median time to get there was 66 days (Lally et al., European Journal of Social Psychology, 2010). A fresh menu every week resets that clock every week. Reuse is not laziness, it is the mechanism. More on how that works.
Your first four good weeks are the hard part. Everything after that is a copy with edits.
Step 1: Save the weeks that worked
After a week where dinner happened five nights out of seven without anyone sulking, that week is worth keeping. Note what you cooked, what you bought, and roughly what it cost. Congratulations, that's a template. Three or four of those, with a bit of seasonal variety, is a whole rotation.
Step 2: Copy, then edit
On planning day, do not open a blank week. Open the best week from three or four weeks ago and copy it. Then change two dinners: one because there's something in the fridge to use up, one because you fancy it. Two changes keep the week from going stale. The other five keep planning down to the length of a cup of tea.
In Cria Planner: a meal plan is one rolling list of days, so every week you have ever planned is still there, just further up. Fold open an earlier stretch, tap Copy, choose the days it should fill, and say whether its shopping items come along on top of the list. Saved meals are offered as templates too: tap them in the order you want and they land on day one, day two, day three. It's the closest thing to a dinner time machine. (Meal plans are part of the paid tiers.)
Step 3: Reuse meals, not just weeks
Sometimes you don't want the whole week back, just Tuesday's stir-fry. Keep the individual meals within reach too. When a dinner turns up for the third time, its ingredients should turn up with it. Retyping "soy sauce, ginger, spring onions" every fortnight is precisely the sort of nonsense that makes people give up.
In Cria Planner: when you add a meal to a day, everything you've cooked before lines up as a row of chips. One tap copies the meal's name, its ingredients and its recipe onto the new day. Long-press a chip to hide a meal you've gone off (we won't tell the meal). Ingredients you've bought before remember their size and price, so the shopping list fills in with the right numbers.
Step 4: Let the recipe carry the shopping
The recipe is the real template. If a recipe holds its ingredient list, reusing the meal and writing the shopping list become the same act. Keep recipes somewhere they can be attached to a day rather than in a folder of screenshots, and the "what do I need to buy" step vanishes for anything you've cooked before.
In Cria Planner, a recipe attached to a meal pushes its missing ingredients onto the plan's shopping list. Recipes can be shared with the other people in your plan, or sent to a friend who imports it straight into their own recipe book. Yes, even that friend.
Step 5: Do the same for anything that repeats
The idea works well beyond food. The weekly clean, the monthly admin day, the swimming-lesson packing list, the run-up to Christmas: anything you've organised once and will organise again is a template in waiting. Cria Planner lets you save any plan as a template and start a new plan from it, so the list of things you did last time becomes the list of things to do this time, with nothing forgotten and nobody pretending they remembered.
A realistic rotation
- Week A: the everyday one. Fast, cheap, nobody complains.
- Week B: a bit more effort, one batch-cook that feeds two nights.
- Week C: the seasonal one, swapped out as the year turns.
- Week D: the "we're busy" week. Freezer, tray bakes, one takeaway, no guilt.
Four weeks, cycled, with two dinners swapped each time. That's a year of dinners planned in about five minutes a week, and a shopping list that's already written before you've sat down. Smug is allowed.
Copy last week. Change two dinners. Done.
Cria Planner keeps every week you've planned, so next week is a copy with edits, shopping list included.