How to never run out of ideas for meal prep even when you're tired as f*ck

Written on Kaurna Yarta. This land was stolen and in the taking was not only of ground - it was of the food systems that grew from it, the seasonal knowledge that ran them, and the practices that held a people and a place in relationship for tens of thousands of years. Sovereignty was never ceded. I pay my respects to Kaurna Elders past and present, and to the knowledge that survived a deliberate attempt to end it.

When you're depleted, you don't have a knowledge problem. You have a decision problem.

TL;DR

Every choice costs something you haven't got. So the fix is fewer decisions, not more information.

Right now: pick two or three things off the low-effort list below that you actually like. Buy them.

When you've got capacity again: learn how a meal is built rather than collecting more recipes. Recipes and energy runs out. Skills and structure doesn't.

The move that ties it together:
1. Batch one protein and one veg.
2. Give it two different flavours across the week.
3. Change carb base e.g. rice or lentils or pasta or potatoes or bread

1. When you've got nothing left in the tank

Cooking asks for planning, decisions, standing up, and cleaning up after.
When you're depleted those are four separate walls, not one.

I can't fix how much energy cooking takes.
We can reduce the number of decisions between you and food.

What and how

What: find a small set of things you like, that you aim to always have available in the house, so food doesn't require a decision.

Mine are:
- Bread
- Wraps
- Oats
- Cheese
- Lentils
- Spinach
- Frozen Berries
- Protein Powder
- Cereal Rotation (High protein Milo/Weetbix bites or Nutritgrain)
- Long Life Soy Milk

Then the following steps will give you food you'll actually eat this week by narrowing your options down instead of opening them up.

Step 1. Name three foods you already like. Not what's optimal.
These are what you'll finish without talking yourself into it.
Eggs. Noodles. Yoghurt. Toast. That one frozen thing.

**Write them somewhere you'll see them.

Step 2. Pick two or three options from the tables below. Only the ones that use those three foods or sound genuinely appealing. Ignore everything else on the page. If I suggest lentils and you hate the texture, that's five dollars and energy you didn't have, gone.

Step 3. Buy them this week. Delivery counts. Whoever's going to the shops counts. This is the only task.

Step 4. Before each meal, ask what is possible today. Not what should be. Some days that's a pan. Some days it's opening a packet. Match the tier to the day you're actually having.

Step 5. Repeat the same meal as often as you like. Porridge every morning for two weeks, if that means breakfast happens, is a win.

The options

Costs per serve at Woolworths, June 2026. Items marked † are from the published grocery price index (1), the rest costed off standard pack sizes. Macros as protein / carbs / fats.

Tier 1. Grab and go - no cooking

Some of those sit low on protein and I've flagged which. Not a reason to skip them. A muesli bar at 3pm is the better alternative to not eating till 8pm and then eating everything.

Tier 2. Mixing - still no heat

Tier 3. Microwave and toaster

Tier 4. Simple cooking - one pan

Why this works

It's a decision problem, not a knowledge problem.
You already know how to make toast. What you haven't got is the capacity to decide, at 7pm, out of infinite options. Three known foods and a short list removes the deciding.

Shortcuts trade the resource you have for the one you don't.
Pre-cut veg, tinned legumes, rice pouches - more money, less energy. Energy is the scarce thing right now.

Tiers stop the all-or-nothing collapse.
When cooking properly is the only version of success, a low day becomes a failed day and you eat nothing. Four tiers means every day has a version that counts. Choosing down is a skill.

Repetition removes decisions instead of adding them.
Variety costs planning. You can add it back later when you've got room. There is no shame in eating the same thing over and over again. Something might come up as you do this. A version of this isn't good enough. Acknowledge it and try to be kind to you.

2. From meal prepping to understanding how a meal is built

Here's the loop I watch people fall into, and I've been in it myself.

Find a recipe. Cook it. Eat it four times. Can't face it again. Stop. Back to square one, except now you also feel like you failed at meal prep.

That's not a discipline problem. That's a structure problem.

It's on Wednesday when it happens. The hump day drop off.

Sunday you cooked with real intent. Monday it was good. Tuesday it was fine. Wednesday you open the container, look at it, and something in your chest just goes no.

Nothing's wrong with the food. You've hit the end of a recipe rather than the end of a pattern.

Where flavour actually comes from

Before the framework, the thing underneath it. This changes how you read everything after.

A cuisine is not a style. It's a record of a place, and a relationship with it.

The flavours that define a cuisine came out of the plants, the animals and the people who co-evolved together somewhere. Every cuisine has a signature built from a core set of aromatics, spices and cooking fats, consistent enough that a few ingredients signal an entire tradition (2).

Lemongrass and galangal say Thai because they grow in that soil, that heat. Olive oil and lemon say Mediterranean for the same reason. Coconut runs through South Indian cooking and ghee through North Indian cooking because of what the land gives in each place. Fermentation is load-bearing in Korean food partly because of winters that had to be eaten through.

Then people worked with what was there. For generations. Figured out what tasted good, what kept, what nourished, what healed, what was worth cooking on a feast day.

The record part is what got laid down. The relationship part is that it's still going. People are still cooking these, still adjusting, still arguing about them at family tables. A cuisine isn't a finished artefact you can lift off a shelf. It's a conversation between a place and a people that hasn't stopped.

Which is also why cuisines can be broken. If a cuisine is a relationship with a place, then take the place and you damage the cuisine. That's not a side effect of colonisation. It's one of its methods. Move people off Country, ban the language the seasonal knowledge is carried in, replace the food system with rations, and the relationship gets severed at both ends.

So when you use the framework below, you're not picking an aesthetic. You're borrowing an answer that a specific place and a specific people arrived at over a very long time, are still arriving at, and in many cases had to fight to keep.

Hold that lightly and seriously at once.

And there's a wider circle around all of this.

When we think about gratitude for food we usually stop at the taste, or the chef, or if we're being thorough, the farmer. All worth thanking. But every single meal you eat puts you in direct relationship with this planet. Not metaphorically. Materially. The soil that grew it, the water that carried it, the weather that let it set fruit, the microbes in the ground doing work nobody paid them for.

You are eating Earth. Every time. There is no other source.

Which means the relationship runs both ways, and it isn't optional.

Where the framework comes from

It isn't new and it isn't mine. Elisabeth Rozin published The Flavor-Principle Cookbook in 1973 (3), arguing that a cuisine's distinct taste comes from a specific combination of flavour principles - olive oil, lemon and oregano equals Greek (4). She named something cooks in every tradition already knew in their hands, and wrote it down so others could use it.

If you want to go further: Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat (5). Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus (6). Nik Sharma's The Flavor Equation (7), which brings the science and does it from outside the default Western frame. Ottolenghi and Tamimi's Jerusalem for the Levant (8).

And the lineage note that matters. All of those writers named patterns that were already being practised for centuries by cooks who mostly weren't writing books. What follows is a description of other people's knowledge. Not a discovery.

The four elements

Every cuisine has a signature built from four things. A fat base. An acid. Aromatics. A spice profile.

Want it to taste Thai? You don't need a recipe. Start with coconut milk. Add lime. Layer in lemongrass and Thai basil. Season with galangal and white pepper. The ratios matter less than hitting all four categories (9).

Each of those four is a place-answer. The fat is what grows or grazes there - olive, coconut, sesame, ghee, lard. The acid is what preserves and brightens - citrus, vinegar, tamarind, yoghurt, ferments. The aromatics are what's in the ground nearby. The spice is trade routes and history laid over the top, and a fair bit of that history is conquest.

The aromatic base turns up nearly everywhere. France has mirepoix. Louisiana has the holy trinity. Italian cooks build soffritto, Spanish and Latin American kitchens rely on sofrito or recaíto, Filipino cooks start with ginisa, and in Indian kitchens spices are bloomed in ghee as a tarka (10).

Different names. Same move. Build flavour in fat before the main ingredient gets anywhere near the pan.

Cooks in unconnected places worked out the same thing independently, because it works.

Protein + Fat + Acid + Aromatics + Spice + Method = a meal

Change one, different dinner. Change two, different cuisine.

A bias I should name before you use any of this

I've built this protein-first. Pick your protein, then decide what to do with it. That's how the tables run and it's how I coach.

It's a bias. Worth saying out loud, because it isn't how most of the world eats or ever has.

It comes from where I work. In health and fitness coaching, protein is what people most reliably under-eat, it's the hardest thing to hit by accident, and it's usually the priciest item in the trolley. Anchor the plan to it and the rest tends to follow.

But it's a Western, recent, relatively wealthy way to think about a meal.

For most of the cuisines below the centre of the plate is the grain or the legume. Rice is the meal across much of Asia and meat goes on top of it, sometimes, in small amounts. Dal and rice is the meal across much of India, complete on its own, no animal protein in sight. Beans and corn is the meal across Mesoamerica, and the two together make a complete protein, which people worked out and built a whole agriculture around long before anyone was weighing grams. Injera holds the meal in Ethiopia. Bread holds it across the Levant.

Meat at the centre of every dinner is recent, industrial and geographically narrow. It's also the most land-hungry and water-hungry way to build a plate, which connects back to the wider circle above.

Take protein-first as scaffolding for a particular purpose. Not a claim about how meals should be built. If it works better for you to start with the base, or with what's in season, or with what's about to go off in the fridge - all legitimate, and several of those have far longer track records than mine.

Origins and Elements that make a "Cuisine"

Rough ratios if you want a start point. A Chinese base sits around 2:1:1 spring onion, ginger, garlic. A Thai base around 2:1:1 basil, ginger, lemongrass (11). Somewhere to begin, not a rule.

Worth noticing what's in some of those rows. Tomato and chilli sit in the Italian and Indian rows and neither is native to either place - both came out of the Americas and travelled on the back of invasion. Lard sits in the Mexican row because pigs arrived with the Spanish. These cuisines absorbed the products of conquest and made something of them. That's resilience, not consent.

What that table is flattening

The table is useful and it's also dishonest if you read it as complete. Saying so isn't decoration on the article. It's part of using it properly.

Every row does violence to somewhere large. If a cuisine is a record of a place and a live relationship with it, then a row covering a whole nation has collapsed dozens of places into one, and frozen a conversation that's still running.

India isn't a cuisine. It's a subcontinent with dozens of food cultures that share very little at ingredient level. Korma is Mughlai, yoghurt and nut based, out of imperial kitchens. Rogan josh is Kashmiri, built on Kashmiri chilli and fennel. Vindaloo is Goan and carries Portuguese vinegar and garlic in from colonisation. Chettinad is Tamil, heavy with black pepper and star anise. Bengali cooking runs on mustard oil and panch phoron. Calling all of that "Indian flavour" is like calling French, Sicilian and Norwegian food "European flavour".

Dal is the clearest case. Dal isn't a dish, it's a category of legume, and each behaves and tastes differently. Moong is soft, light, quick, often what you eat when you're unwell. Toor is the backbone of South Indian sambar, sour with tamarind. Chana is nuttier and holds its shape. Masoor cooks down fast. Urad is what makes dal makhani heavy. Then the tadka on top changes again by region and by household. "Dal" tells you almost nothing.

Kimchi is the same problem from another angle. There is no kimchi flavour. There are hundreds of kimchis - baechu with napa cabbage, kkakdugi with radish, oi sobagi with cucumber, dongchimi that's barely spicy at all. The northern regions of the peninsula are known for white kimchi and dongchimi with fewer red pepper flakes, and the taste and appearance varies with the amount of chilli and the type of fermented fish paste used in each region (12). Which is itself a co-evolution story, since the ratios track climate and what's to hand.

And underneath all the regional variation, every family has their own recipe. The specific methods and ingredients used in kimjang are considered important family heritage, typically passed from mother to daughter-in-law (12). Kimjang, the collective making and sharing of it, was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013 (13). It's also worth knowing that Korean food culture was actively suppressed under Japanese occupation, which is part of why that inscription carries the weight it does.

Same goes for everything else in that table. No single Mexican salsa. No single Thai curry paste. No single Italian ragù.

I'm going to leave this tension open rather than tidy it up, because I don't think it resolves.

You're exhausted and you need a simplification to get dinner on the table. The simplification is a flattening of something living. Both true at the same time. I use the table. I also know what it costs. Sitting in that discomfort is more honest than pretending either half away.

Use it like a map. It'll get you moving roughly the right way. It is not the country.

The bigger thing underneath

Michael Twitty, the culinary historian who developed the idea of culinary justice, draws a line worth keeping. Cultural diffusion is what happens naturally when people of different cultures live close together and rub off on one another. Appropriation, he says, is about exploitation, abuse and theft (14). His framing of culinary justice is that historically oppressed peoples and people of colour should have the right to be recognised for their gastronomic contributions, and to derive empowerment from them (15).

Cooking a curry at home on a Tuesday isn't the problem.

Food is not just fuel and it never has been. If a cuisine is the record of a place and a people, and an ongoing relationship with both, then taking it without acknowledgement isn't borrowing a technique. It's taking a piece of someone's history and selling it back to them.

Colonisation took land first. Then it took the food that grew on the land, the labour that worked it, the seeds, the seasonal knowledge, the names, and often the language the knowledge was held in. Plantation agriculture is the clearest version - sugar, coffee, cacao, cotton, spices - land seized, people enslaved or indentured to work it, and the product exported to enrich somewhere else. The recipes that came out of those kitchens got separated from the people who made them and rebranded as national cuisine somewhere colder.

And then the last turn of the screw.

The same systems that extracted crops and labour out of colonised places went on to produce a nutrition science that told those same people their staple foods were making them sick, so now rice is bad for you and corn is bad for you and cassava and plantain and potato are all suspect while bread and pasta somehow walked away clean, and the foods getting named as the problem are the exact ones those places co-evolved with over thousands of years, selected and bred and refined by those people precisely because they worked, and they're the ones sitting at the centre of the plate, which is the same argument I just made about my own protein-first bias except this time it arrived with a nutrition label on it and a study behind it.

That's not neutral science. That's the same pattern in a lab coat.

Corn shows how deep it goes. Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica developed nixtamalisation - steeping maize kernels in limewater, which separates the outer walls from the grain and frees the niacin (16). Co-evolution in action. A plant and a people developing together until the food and the knowledge of how to prepare it became one thing.

The process was not a secret. Much of it happened outdoors in easily observed public areas. Europeans chose not to pay attention to it. Corn crossed the Atlantic and the process did not, and corn-dependent populations in both Europe and North America went on to suffer pellagra, a chronic niacin deficiency (17).

Colonisers took the corn and left the technique.

Separating the knowledge from the food caused actual disease. At the peak of the twentieth century pellagra epidemic in the United States, there were more than 250,000 cases and 7,000 deaths a year, concentrated in the South (18).

That is what happens when you take a food and leave its relationship behind.

Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef behind The Sioux Chef and NATIFS, does this work in reverse - revitalising Native foodways as a matter of food sovereignty and cultural resilience (19).

Because who controls what you eat has always been a question of power.

So, practically. Learn the actual name of the dish. Learn the region, not just the country. Ask what grows there and why the dish is built the way it is. Buy from the shops run by the people whose food it is. When something becomes a regular in your kitchen, go and learn the proper version from someone who holds it.

And where you are, learn whose Country you're eating on. In my case Kaurna. Learn what grew here, what still does, and who holds that knowledge.

Cook from people. Not from tables like mine.

None of that makes dinner harder. It makes it honest.

3. One protein, twelve meals

Everything from here assumes you've got some capacity back. On a low day, section 1 is still the correct answer. Not the fallback version of the answer.

If you only do one thing with this section: learn one of these properly and you've got the pattern. The other eleven are there when you want them.

Same tofu every time. Nothing else stays the same.

Twelve dinners. One shopping decision. The tofu never changed.

It works because the protein was never carrying the flavour. It's texture and nutrition. The signature does the work.

Two notes on that table.

Tofu is Chinese, developed there and carried out through East and Southeast Asia. Most of those dishes traditionally use something else and I've swapped tofu in. Fine thing to do in your own kitchen. Different thing to serve it and call it the authentic dish.

And in most of those traditions the tofu isn't the centre of the meal. The rice is. I've inverted it here for the reasons above. It's an inversion, not the original arrangement.

4. Cuisines and their proteins

Flip it round. Pick the row, use whatever's in the fridge.

If you only do one thing with this section: pick one row. That's your week.

Two proteins across eight rows is sixteen dinners.

Same caveat. Each cell is one dish standing in for a whole tradition. Doorways, not summaries.

And the legume column isn't the vegetarian afterthought the layout makes it look like. In several of those traditions it's the main event, and it's the column that asks least of the ground it grew in.

5. Modifiers - more variety, no more cooking

Before you reach for any of these, work out what's actually flat.

Bored of the flavour, or bored of the texture? Sick of the dish, or sick of eating it out of the same container at your desk? Is it the food, or is it that you've had a hard week and nothing tastes like anything?

The answer changes which lever you pull. Reaching for a new recipe when the problem is texture is how people end up cooking more and enjoying it less.

If you only do one thing with this section: acid or texture. Skip the rest.

Cooking method

Method changes texture and effort more than flavour, which makes it the fastest thing to shift when time's short. It's usually the actual reason people think they can't cook on a weeknight.

Method is a place-answer too. Wok cooking developed where fuel was scarce and food had to move fast on high heat. Slow braising developed where fuel was cheap and the cuts were tough. Fermentation developed where winter was long.

Pressure cooking and slow cooking get their own bold because they solve the exact thing you told me about.

When someone says they haven't got time to cook, what they usually mean is they haven't got attention to give it. Standing at a stove for forty minutes is the barrier. Not the forty minutes.

Both of these separate cook time from your time.

Base

Same protein, same sauce, different meal. Teriyaki tofu on rice is not the same dinner as teriyaki tofu in a wrap. Rice, noodles, wraps, bread, couscous, potato, or a pile of greens.

Format

Bowl, wrap, soup, salad, on toast, in a jaffle. How you assemble it shifts the experience more than you'd think for something that costs nothing.

Temperature

Hot sauce over hot protein. Or the same protein cold with a dressing, over salad. Two clearly different meals out of one batch, and the cold one needs no cooking at all.

Texture

Toasted seeds. Crispy shallots. Pickled veg. Fresh herbs. Crushed nuts. A spoon of yoghurt.

Cheapest fix on the list.

Contrast, which is what's underneath all of them

Opposing flavours create interest and complexity. Acid cuts through rich, fatty flavours. A touch of sweetness balances out spice (20). Contrast stops a dish going one-note.

Which gives us the fix for the hump day drop off.

When your prep goes stale mid-week it is nearly always a missing acid or a missing texture. Almost never a missing recipe.

Squeeze a lemon over it. Add pickled onion. Add a crunchy thing.

6. Where this leaves us

Two things are true at once and both matter.

When you're depleted, drop the bar and eat. Simple food, repeated food, bought food, assembled food. Your body does not care whether the meal was impressive. Eating consistently while you're running on empty is an achievement, not a compromise.

When you've got capacity, build the structure instead of the recipe list. Learn the four elements. Learn six or seven origins properly, with their real names and their regions. Then you've got something that doesn't run out, because you're generating meals rather than remembering them.

And do it with your eyes open about where the food came from.

Every one of those signatures came from plants and animals and people who worked each other out over a very long time in one particular place, and who are still working it out. Many of them held onto that through active attempts to take it from them. That isn't decoration on the recipe. That is the recipe.

And underneath all of it, the planet that grew every single ingredient.

If you want to keep eating, that relationship has to be tended. Not as an abstract environmental position - as the literal precondition for there being food. Soil that's been mined rather than fed stops producing. Water that's been taken faster than it returns stops arriving. Weather that's been destabilised stops being something a farmer can plan around.

Convenience is the thing we've been sold instead of that relationship. And convenience is what I've just spent a whole section defending, because when you're depleted you need it and I'm not going to moralise at someone running on empty.

But convenience can't be the whole arrangement. It's a bridge, not a destination.

The tables here are simplifications of living traditions that belong to people still cooking them, still arguing about them at family tables, still holding knowledge no table of mine can carry.

That last part might land as one more thing you're not doing well enough, especially reading it on an empty week.

Notice that, and don't let it become the reason you stop. Learning where one dish comes from is the whole practice. You're not required to do it for all twelve. Same principle as the tiers - one is real, one counts.

Same goes for the framework. It puts protein in the middle because of where I coach, not because that's how a meal is meant to be built. Use it while it's useful and put it down when something better fits.

I don't know everything about this. I'm working it out too, one meal at a time, mostly badly, sometimes well.

You were never given the structure. That's not a personal failing. It's what happens when food gets cut off from the places and people it came from, and sold back to us as convenience.

So we can keep buying our way out of it one exhausted week at a time, or we can start putting the relationship back together - with the food, with the people it came from, and with the ground it grew in.

One's convenient. One keeps us fed.

Which one are you starting tonight?

References

1. Savings.com.au. Grocery Price Index: Coles v Woolworths. Updated 14 July 2026. https://www.savings.com.au/statistics/grocery-price-index
2. ScienceInsights. What Is a Flavor Profile? Taste, Aroma & Mouthfeel. https://scienceinsights.org/what-is-a-flavor-profile-taste-aroma-mouthfeel/
3. Rozin, E. (1973). The Flavor-Principle Cookbook. New York: Hawthorn Books. https://archive.org/details/flavorprinciplec00rozi
4. Rozin, E. (1983). Ethnic Cuisine: How to Create the Authentic Flavors of Over 30 International Cuisines. S. Greene Press.
5. Nosrat, S. (2017). Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. Simon & Schuster.
6. Segnit, N. (2010). The Flavour Thesaurus. Bloomsbury.
7. Sharma, N. (2020). The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained. Chronicle Books.
8. Ottolenghi, Y., & Tamimi, S. (2012). Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Ten Speed Press.
9. Savor. What Is a Flavor Profile and How Do You Read One. https://www.savortheapp.com/blog/food-memories-journaling/what-is-a-flavor-profile/
10. Escoffier. Global Aromatic Bases: From Mirepoix to Sofrito to the Holy Trinity. https://www.escoffier.edu/blog/recipes/aromatic-bases/
11. Red Stick Spice. Great Beginnings: Mirepoix, Trinity, Sofrito and More. https://blog.redstickspice.com/great-beginnings-mirepoix-trinity-sofrito-and-more/
12. Kulture Kween. Kimchi: Korea's UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. https://www.kulturekween.com/kimchi-korean-culture/
13. UNESCO. Kimjang, making and sharing kimchi in the Republic of Korea. Inscribed 2013. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/kimjang-making-and-sharing-kimchi-in-the-republic-of-korea-00881
14. ButcherBox. How We Think About Food, Representation, and Cultural Appropriation. Citing Michael Twitty, Culinary Justice: Defining a Theory of Gastronomic Sovereignty, University of Michigan, 2017. https://justcook.butcherbox.com/how-we-think-about-food-representation-and-cultural-appropriation/
15. Edible Alaska. Thought for Food. Citing Michael Twitty on culinary justice. https://ediblealaska.ediblecommunities.com/food-thought/food-thought-food-history/
16. Earth@Home. Cultural history of maize. https://evolution.earthathome.org/grasses/andropogoneae/maize-culture/
17. Southern Foodways Alliance. Malnourished: Cultural ignorance paved the way for pellagra. https://www.southernfoodways.org/malnourished-cultural-ignorance-paved-the-way-for-pellagra/
18. Sullivan, J. (2024). Nixtamalization: How Ancient Americans Bio-Engineered Corn. TheCollector. https://www.thecollector.com/nixtamalization-ancient-americans-corn/
19. Sherman, S. The Sioux Chef and NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems). https://siouxchef.substack.com/
20. Selfup New York. The Science of Flavor: Understanding Taste Profiles in Cooking. https://new-york.selfup.com/blogs/nyc-magazine/understanding-taste-profiles

Further reading, not directly cited: Twitty, M. (2017). The Cooking Gene. Amistad. Sherman, S. (2017). The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen. University of Minnesota Press.