Meal prep for one person, without eating the same thing five days running

Most meal prep advice assumes a household. Cook a vast tray of something on Sunday, divide it into containers, done. Cooking for one, that plan has a flaw you discover on Wednesday, when you open the fridge and find the same curry looking back at you for the fourth time.

Prep components, not meals

The fix is to stop making finished dishes in advance and start making parts. A cooked grain, a cooked protein, a tray of roasted vegetables and one sauce will become four genuinely different meals, because you combine them differently each time.

A typical Sunday, forty minutes, mostly unattended:

• One pot of grains. Rice, quinoa or couscous, enough for three portions.
• One protein. Bake chicken thighs, a tray of tofu, or boil six eggs. If you eat fish, cook that fresh instead — it keeps less well.
• One tray of vegetables. Whatever is cheap: peppers, courgette, carrots, broccoli. Oil, salt, 200 °C, 25 minutes.
• One sauce. Yogurt with garlic and lemon, or tahini with lemon and water. It is the sauce that makes Tuesday taste different from Monday.

Monday that is a bowl. Tuesday the same things in a wrap. Wednesday fried rice with an egg on top. Nothing repeats, and you cooked once.

Buy for three days, not seven

Cooked food keeps about three days in the fridge, so a seven-day shop for one person is mostly a plan to throw food away. Two smaller shops, or one shop plus a freezer, waste far less. Frozen vegetables and frozen berries are the quiet heroes of cooking for one: no spoilage, no half a cabbage going brown in the drawer.

Cook once, eat twice

If batch cooking is not your temperament, the lighter version still works: when you cook dinner, make one and a half portions. Tomorrow's lunch is done, and you did not spend a Sunday on it.

Three things worth keeping in the cupboard

• Tinned beans or chickpeas. Dinner in ten minutes when the plan collapses.
• Eggs. The fastest protein there is.
• Frozen vegetables. They turn a sad plate of pasta into a meal.

Keep it safe

Cool cooked food quickly, get it into the fridge in a sealed container rather than leaving it on the hob to cool for hours, and use it within three days. Reheat it properly hot, once.

If you want the week written down

The Healthy Weekly Meal Planner has a prep page with a fridge log, so you can see at a glance what you cooked and when it needs eating, and a grocery list sorted the way a shop is laid out. The recipe books mark every recipe that works for meal prep, and the 7-Day Healthy Meal Plan comes with the whole week's shopping already totalled.