Plan CONNECTED MEALS to SAVE TIME in the kitchen

Cooking delicious plant-based 🌱 meals doesn’t have to take hours of planning and cooking every week. In this video, I’ll share the #1 lesson I’ve learned from 10 years of plant-based meal planning: how to plan smart, cook less, and eat better.

You’ll learn about the two key principles: building blocks and two-week planning. I’ll walk you through real-life examples from my Vegan Family Meal Plans so you can see exactly how this works in practice.

Whether you’re new to meal planning or just tired of flipping through endless cookbooks and scrolling to the bottom of Pinterest, this approach will save you time, reduce stress, and help you enjoy healthy, tasty vegan meals every day.

👉 Don’t forget to comment below to share how you currently do your meal planning (or if you don’t at all!).

📥 Free gift: Download your 2-week Vegan Family Meal Plan template here: https://veganfamilykitchen.com/free-2-week-vegan-meal-plan/

Lots of other templates here: https://veganfamilykitchen.com/templates-and-printables/

💚 Want me to plan for you? Subscribe to the Vegan Family Meal Plans: https://veganfamilykitchen.com/vegan-meal-plans/
Use coupon code YOUTUBE for 25% off!

00:00 – Why I needed a better system
01:00 – The #1 lesson from 10 years of vegan meal planning
02:00 – Principle 1: Think in building blocks
03:15 – Principle 2: Plan two weeks at a time
04:00 – Real-life examples: November meal plan
07:45 – More examples: February meal plan
11:15 – Final example: Lentils, beans & polenta magic
14:15 – Challenge: Try 2-week planning with building blocks
15:45 – Free meal plan template & subscription details

I don’t like to cook, but eating really good food is super important for me. So, I have to plan smart and make sure that every minute I’m going to spend in this kitchen is spent well. When I first committed to eating a fully plant-based diet back in 2015, I would spend hours planning my meals for the week. I was flipping through cookbooks and browsing blogs and looking at all the things on Pinterest and elsewhere to find the right recipes for myself and my I needed to find seven different dinners to say nothing of lunches and breakfasts and probably also snacks. It was a huge chore and for most people it is not sustainable to do that. It certainly was not sustainable for me and I needed to find a better system that worked. If you are doing that please stop. I give you permission to stop. There is a better way. Since 2017, I became a professional meal planner and I have learned a ton about how to streamline meal planning so that the actual cooking is faster, more efficient, and at the same time brings not only delicious food but nutritious meals. In this video, I’m going to share the number one lesson that I have learned from those 10 years of plant-based meal planning. I will teach you the two principles that make it possible for you to plan smarter so that you can cook less and eat better. Then I will show you several examples based on my vegan family meal plans of how that can play out in practice. I have crafted the meal plans in exquisite detail over several years. So you are for sure going to learn a lot from my experience without having to go through all of those years of revisions that I have had to go through. Before we get started, I would like you to put a comment below to tell me how you’re currently doing your meal planning. Or maybe you’re not doing it. Just share. That’s okay. There’s two big ideas that I want to introduce in this video. The first one is the concept of building blocks. The second one is the commitment to planning your meals two weeks at a time. Let’s talk about building blocks. Please stop thinking about individual meals. Instead, start seeing the building blocks, the components you can mix and match to compose different meals that will be nutritious and delicious. Think, for example, of a simple pasta dinner. You have the noodles, the pasta, the sauce, and some kind of topping. I love vegan parma. Those three building blocks could be combined into different meals. The noodles, if there’s leftovers, could be repurposed in a soup, for example, or in a salad. The sauce could be served on roasted potatoes or roasted mushrooms. That’s my favorite way to do it. Roasted porttoella mushroom caps with pasta vegan bologn sauce on top. So delicious and also a little bit elegant. And the topping, well, it could go on absolutely anything you like. I have a preference myself to put it on pasta, but it works well on salads and other components as well. It will add that little finishing touch not just to the pasta dish, but to different dishes you can do later in the week. And that is the key to cooking once and eating twice or even more times. The second big idea is to plan your meals two weeks at a time. And that is important to optimize diversity. Now, diversity is important not just because we might get bored of eating the same thing several times, but also because our gut microbiome, all of those little billions of underlords that live within us, they love diversity. And in fact, they fare better when they get at least 30 different plants every week. This method empowers me to have way more nutrients in my meals and at the same time enjoying a much greater diversity thanks to the building blocks and to planning two weeks at a time. And often I get leftovers for lunches too and that is really a big bonus. Okay, enough theory. We are going to move into looking at what this looks like in practice. taking some examples from the vegan family meal plans. I am starting here with the meal plan from weeks 45 and 46. So that’s early November just to give you some background. And in the list of advanced prep components, there’s some items that come back multiple times. Roasting vegetables, creating a soprito, you know, that’s the classic carrot, celery, and onion combination that is the base of so many delicious uh simmered dishes. uh roasting some squash. So that was done with the other vegetables. Making a bolo sauce that will be used in two different dishes as I just gave as an example when talking about building blocks and also roasting beets. And that’s about it. So what does that look like? In the prep session, I’m roasting both the broccoli and the butternut squash. And those will be used in three different meals. Also the soprito preparation, onion, carrots, celery sauteed together for about 10 minutes to develop those sweet flavors. Those form the base of so many classic dishes, especially simmered dishes. And in the case of this meal plan, the soprito is used in a paella, in a butternut squash soup, in the bolo sauce, and in a coconut potato soup. Also, take note that the coconut potato soup is made in the slow cooker. And normally if you put those ingredients, you know, the onion, carrots, celery in the slow cooker on its own, they won’t quite develop depth of flavor in the same way as they would if you so saute them at a higher temperature. And so by making the soprito in advance, we ensure that we have a much tastier meal than if we had just put those ingredients in the slow cooker to begin with. The fall bologn sauce, you make a big batch. It is used in two different meals and it’s likely to generate leftovers as well. Also, in this meal plan, there is a dragon sauce that goes in a dragon bowl, but there’s enough leftovers to serve as dressing in a big quinoa salad. And of course, there’s vegan palm nuts, and I can put that stuff on everything. But it will definitely be a feature in two of the meals here, the ones with the bolo sauce. And then in the second week prep session, there is another couple trays of roasted vegetables that have multiple uses throughout the week. As you can tell, these meal plans make significant use of a weekend batch cooking session. That’s what we do, by the way, at cooking club. You can join us. It’s free. Every other Sunday, we get together and we do our batch cooking. It really helps with accountability, for showing up, and it adds just quite a bit of energy to do it together. However, you don’t have to do those things in a batch cooking session. Many times I haven’t done my prep. That was in the past before I started the cooking club. And when I didn’t do the prep on the week nights, I would look at the items that were previously known as batch cooking items. And either I would just make them on the fly right at that moment, but it would mean that dinner would take longer. So, if you’re going to roast vegetables, it doesn’t take just 5 minutes, that takes longer. So, if I’m working from home, I can start that in advance. That doesn’t work for everybody, but sometimes just mixing a dressing doesn’t take very long, but I find that if I have some more complex building blocks to prepare on the week nights, it reduces my motivation to cook by quite a bit. So, having done them in advance is a winning combination for being super efficient in the kitchen, getting in and out in less time. It also saves time and makes cleaning up a lot more efficient to have done the batch cooking ahead of time. So, I strongly recommend it if you are going to adopt a building block approach. Let’s look at a slightly different kind of example here in meal plan for weeks five and six. That’s in early February. Again, you can build your own meal plan. I’m just giving these to give you a sense of how I’ve been doing it for the past many years in the vegan family meal plan concept because I’ve spent so much time on these. So, might as well talk about them, right? One big building block in weeks five and six is homemade Satan. So, Satan is a loaf of vegan meat made from gluten. You can actually buy ready-made Satan. In fact, that’s what all the, not all, but many of the vegan processed meats are made of. And also you can buy plain Satan that hasn’t yet made been made into a fancier vegan meat product. However, it is so satisfying and frankly I think it tastes better to make it at home and it’s not that hard but there is no way you can do that at dinner time because Satan needs at least an hour or two to be made to begin with and then it really benefits from sitting in the fridge overnight. So that’s just not possible. But it is a perfect building block that you can batch cook previously and then divide across multiple meals in the future. So that is one somewhat fancy example here of building block batch cooking and building block thinking because the Satan shows up in this meal plan in two different meals. A beefy Vietnamese type soup, you know, a faux soup. My Vietnamese accent is not really good. um and also shows up in a sizzling broccoli and Satan stir fry with noodles and I’m quite sure it generates enough leftovers for different meals depending of course on how many people will be um eating. So that’s a great building block to have. Also in the first week prep session there’s some roasted vegetables. And another item that is a little bit different in how it’s done here is that a weekn night meal generates leftovers that cascade into another night’s meal. So the assembly of the uh couscous salad here. It’s a curried couscous salad. The vegetables are roasted on the weekend. The salad is pulled together at dinner time, you know, when it’s time to eat. And the leftovers are saved for another meal on the Friday, which is couscous wraps with green salad. So now the salad is a side green salad, but the couscous curry couscous that we made 3 days earlier are reused in a wrap. And sure, you could have thought about that yourself. You open the fridge and there’s leftover couscous salad and you could think, “Oh yes, I will make it into a wrap.” But then maybe you don’t have the pizza wraps to make it happen. So having that planning happen ahead of time allows you to have the right ingredients to cook once, eat twice, maybe more than twice, and not have to think when it’s time to make dinner because I don’t know about you, but for me at 6 p.m. it is not a great time to make decisions. And this situation is uh happening again in the second week of this meal plan where early in the week there’s a slow cooker chili that happens. It is made on Tuesday night and there’s leftovers that appear in a different kind of form in the Friday as tacos. Let’s look at one final example. The meal plan, vegan family meal plan from weeks 23 and 24. Again, several examples. I’ll just give you two. One of them on the Wednesday of the first week, I make I recommend making a spring lentil ratatouille that is served on palenta. And the palenta is served in creamy style. It’s just made. It’s fresh. It’s made on the Wednesday night at the time of eating. The ratatouille has been made in the batch cooking session. So, it enables a little bit of slack on that Wednesday night to make the palenta. The leftovers from the palenta are then refrigerated and saved to get grilled palenta the following week. That would not be possible on the week night. It’s just not possible to make fresh palenta and then shape it and then grill it. that would take hours. So having that task spread over the two weeks makes it really easy to enjoy pollenta two different ways. And that is also a good example of how splitting the meal plans over two weeks was valuable. The other aspect in this meal plan that’s interesting is that in the first week there’s a black bean burrito bowl and so the black beans and the brown rice are prepared on the weekend prior. You could do that at the last minute, I suppose, but that would take a long time to prepare all of that just before dinner, especially brown rice that takes a long time to cook. And there’s extra black beans and extra brown rice that are cooked to be formed into burger patties. And the burger patties can be frozen or refrigerated, but in this case, they’re frozen and eaten the following week. And in that way, it means we’re having black beans over two different weeks. We’re making our gut microbiome happy by having all of that diversity without doing so much extra work, having to cook two different batches of seasoned black beans. Not every meal plan has to be a perfect puzzle. Some of the meals are a stir fry that is made right on the spot, and that is enjoyable, too. But I cannot be doing that every single night. I need that balance between the building blocks that are preferably prepped ahead and the last minute food that I prepare. so that it’s really fresh. For example, with those pasta dishes, well, personally, I don’t like pasta that has been cooked previously. I like it to be fresh. Look, I hear you. You know, I could be pulling processed, readym made vegan meats out of the freezer and that would be way faster than doing the kind of building block cooking approach that I’ve just talked to you about. However, I do not want to be eating vegan processed food out of the freezer all the time. It’s okay for me, my family to enjoy it once in a while, but not every single night. And that is where having the batch cooking approach makes such a difference with those building blocks that have been spread out over the different weeks. So, here’s a challenge. This Friday, I challenge you, I encourage you to plan your meals for the coming two weeks. The first few times you’re going to do this, it will take a little bit longer than what you’re used to. However, you just have to do it every other week, not every single week. So, you get a little bit of a break. Instead of starting your meal plan with individual recipes, as I used to do, you can instead think in terms of building blocks and combine those building blocks to create different meals over the course of 14 nights. When you’re just getting started with a building block approach, I suggest you start with just maybe a grain or a simmered dish or two, like a chili or curry, something you can make in the slow cooker. Those are great places to start. A sauce or a dressing can also be purposed in multiple different meals. And you still get the variety with minimal batch cooking or building block preparation. Batch cooking on the weekend does make a big difference here. And you can even just be batch cooking for an hour or 90 minutes and see amazing results. So, put it down in your calendar, commit to doing it, and you will be so glad that you did because eating really good food is super important. If you’d rather not create your own plan and instead follow my example, you can download a free twoe template of the vegan family meal plan. I will put the link down in the notes below. So, help yourself. See how it’s done. If you really like it and you’d rather have me do it for you, well, you are welcome to subscribe. The address is below as well. It’s less than $2.50 per week for a year and you are going to be basically experiencing kind of a one-year very applied cooking course where you can get into healthy vegan cooking using that approach of the building blocks and planning two weeks at a time. You can use coupon code YouTube to get 25% off the meal plans. I would be super excited if you tried, but if that’s not for you, again, download that twoe template and make your own. That is perfectly fine as well. I hope this was useful and I very much look forward to seeing you again