Where the nine portions come from
Each dinner is cooked on its first night for two portions, plus one portion per person who takes leftovers for lunch the next day. If you go past three nights, the same dinner comes back on nights four to six, so the batch is doubled instead of cooked twice.
A portion is Food Hero’s serving measure, so 1/2 cup of Lentil Taco Filling, 1 cup of Vegetarian Chili, 1 cup of Pork Chili. That is a modest plate. If one dinner is a soup, or you are hungry, plan on two portions each. Choosing Both of us for lunch does that for dinner too, since it cooks four portions a night. When a dinner comes out at 3/8 or 3/4 of a batch, we would cook the whole batch and freeze the rest. The recipe page is written for the full batch, and the fractions of a can are what you get when the arithmetic is exact.
Before you use this, one warning: the list looks complete, and it is not. None of these recipes includes the rice, the bread or the tortillas you will eat them with, so the grocery list does not either. Add those yourself.
These three share chili powder, cumin, onion, oregano, corn, so one head of garlic or one jar of cumin covers more than one night. If you do not like a dinner, swap it for one of the 42 others that fit your diet and time settings, or press Shuffle. Six days means each pot comes back once, so on night four you are eating night one again. We would keep it to three or four days unless all three dinners are ones you would happily eat twice.
Box up tomorrow’s lunch before you eat
Put tomorrow’s lunch in its container before you sit down to eat. It cools faster that way, and nobody takes seconds from it. The leftovers on nights four to six are still inside the FDA’s three-to-four-day window, but only because that dinner was cooked no more than three days before. That is why the plan never stretches one batch past night six.
The recipes and serving sizes come from Food Hero, a tested collection run by Oregon State University Extension. Follow the linked recipe for the method. The FDA and USDA say leftovers keep three to four days in a fridge at 40°F (4°C) or below. The plans on this site stay inside that limit.
For more than two people, or a week of different dinners, use the meal planner.