How to plan when you cook once and eat it all week

Cooking is not eating: what a batch is

In the planner, a batch is something you cooked that will be eaten over more than one meal. You record it once, on the day you cooked it, with what it made: 2.5 L of soup, 1.2 kg of chilli, 8 servings of dal. From then on the planner keeps a running balance of how much is left.

The important rule is that a batch counts in nobody's nutrition until some of it is used. Cooking a pot of soup on Friday does not put ten bowls of soup into Friday's numbers. Only the bowl you eat, on the day you eat it, goes into your day. Food you give away or throw out comes off the balance and counts for nobody.

This is different from planning the same recipe on four days. Planning it four times tells the shopping list to buy the ingredients four times and tells your nutrition that you ate a full serve each day, whether or not you did. A batch buys the ingredients once and records the bowls as they happen.

Record what you cooked

1. On the day you cooked, choose + Cooked a batch beside + Add meal. It opens the same dialog as adding a meal, so you can pick a recipe from the recipe book, one of your own saved recipes, or paste the ingredients you used.
2. Instead of asking how many servings to prepare, the dialog asks what it made. Enter the amount the way your container reads: 2.5 L, 1.2 kg, 6 cups, or a number of servings if that is how you think of it.
3. Add it. The batch appears in a Leftovers strip above the day's meals, with its name, how much is left, and when it was cooked. It is not in anyone's nutrition yet.
4. If you improvised from the fridge rather than following a recipe, paste the ingredients as a list. The review step lets you check each food match before the batch is saved. Nothing is calculated from a food you have not confirmed.

If you weigh the finished pot, record the weight rather than the volume. A weight is exact; a volume is converted at 1 g per mL, which is right for soups and stocks and a little low for dense stews. Either way, the share you take out later is worked out from what you recorded.

Use some of it on any day

The Leftovers strip is shown on whichever day you are looking at, not only on the day the batch was cooked. A batch cooked on Friday is wanted on Tuesday, and having to navigate back to Friday to find it would be the whole feature lost. The oldest batch is listed first, as a nudge towards using things up.

1. Open the day you are eating it and choose Use some beside the batch.
2. Choose what happened: Ate some, Gave away, or Threw it out.
3. Enter how much. The amount is asked in the smaller unit of the batch's family: 300 mL from a batch recorded in litres, 150 g from one recorded in kilograms. The dialog shows what share of the batch that is.
4. For Ate some, choose who ate it, the day and the meal. It becomes a meal on that day for that person and counts in their nutrition. For Gave away or Threw it out, add an optional note such as To Dad, and it comes off the balance and counts for nobody.

The portion you used last time is remembered for that batch on your device, so the second bowl is one tap. The balance is allowed to go negative, because people estimate: if you recorded 2.5 L and the pot turned out to hold 2.7 L, record what you actually took and the strip will say so rather than refusing.

After three weeks a batch asks Still got this? with Still here and All gone. It is never silently dropped and never silently kept, because a leftovers list that lies is worse than none.

Use a batch as an ingredient in another dish

The last 250 mL of soup goes into a pasta bake. Diluted stock from the same pot becomes the base of a fortnight of risottos. These are not meals drawn from the batch; the batch is an ingredient of something else. The planner handles that without counting anything twice.

1. Open the dish on the day you are cooking it and choose Edit ingredients for this meal.
2. In From a batch, choose the batch and enter how much goes in, in millilitres or grams.
3. Add to this dish. The batch's own ingredients come into the dish scaled to that share, each keeping its own food record and preparation, so the nutrition engine sees carrots and lentils rather than a guess at what soup contains. In the ingredient list they appear as one line, such as From Red lentil soup · 250 mL · 15 ingredients, and can be removed as one.
4. Save the meal. The meal and the draw from the batch are saved together, so the batch's balance comes down by the same amount the strip shows. One batch per save; to add a second, save and then edit again.

Because the batch was already bought, nothing that came from it is put on the shopping list again. If you later take the batch back out of the dish, it goes back on the balance when you save.

A batch can go into another batch. Stock made from the soup is itself recorded as a batch, and the risottos draw from the stock. Each dish still sees the original ingredients, scaled twice, and the line shows where it came from.

Log a single food without a recipe

Not everything you eat is a dish. A handful of almonds, an apple, a glass of milk. These are logged from the snack slot with + Add a food: find the food in the same search the recipe editor uses, pick it, and add it. There is no recipe to build and no automatic matching; you choose the record yourself.

The amount comes from the food record's own household portions where it has them. Many Australian records do not, so the dialog offers a typical serve, such as 30 g for a small handful of nuts, labelled as typical rather than a recommendation, and you can type the weight instead. Who ate it, the day and the meal are asked the same way as for a leftover.

Reading your nutrition in plain words

If percentages of a daily reference feel like homework, switch the nutrition panel to plain words. In your account's nutrition profile, choose Show my nutrition as: Plain words, or use Show plain words in the planner's nutrition header. Every bar then reads as one of five words: covered, nearly, a bit low, short, or no data.

The words are the same bands every time. Covered means the planned amount reaches the daily reference; nearly means at least 80 per cent of it; a bit low means at least half; short means less than half; no data means the foods you planned do not report that nutrient, which is not the same as zero. The figure is always one hover or one tap away, and nothing is calculated differently.

How daily references are chosen →

A worked week

Here is the week this guide was written for, with hypothetical amounts. On Friday you make 2.5 L of red lentil soup from a recipe that yields 10 servings, so each 250 mL is one serving. You record it as a batch.

The shopping list for the week buys the soup's ingredients once, on Friday. Tuesday's bowl and Thursday's pasta bake add nothing to it from the soup. Your dad's 2 L is in nobody's numbers. If the pot turns out to have more in it than you recorded, take what you actually took; the balance going below zero is a sign to weigh the next pot, not an error.

Try it with foods and recipes

Compare iron in Australian foods by household serve, then compare recipes by their reported nutrients per serving. Check the food form, recipe yield and missing values before making a comparison.

Turn your chosen recipes into a meal plan and shopping list.