WHAT TO COOK THIS WEEK: PLAN YOUR MENU IN MINUTES

Staring into an open fridge with no idea what to make is one of the small daily torments. It's not that you can't cook: it's that after a day of making decisions, your brain doesn't want to choose anything else. Experts call it decision fatigue, and the best way to fight it with food is not to decide every night, but just once a week. Here's a quick method to build your weekly menu in a few minutes.

1. Decide once, not seven times

The trick is to bundle all the decisions into a single moment, say Sunday. Sit down for ten minutes, think about all seven days at once and lock in the menu. During the week you won't have to think: just cook what's on the list. Deciding in bulk is far less tiring than facing the doubt every night, hungry and in a hurry.

2. Use chance to spark the ideas

The blank page is the hardest part. Instead of thinking from scratch, let a tool suggest: with the random food generator you get a dish in one tap, and you can filter by type (main, dessert, something to snack on). Generate three or four ideas in a row and keep the one you fancy for each day. Reacting to a suggestion is much faster than inventing one.

3. Balance the week

So you don't end up eating pasta five days running, spread the food groups across the week. A simple template that works:

• Two days of legumes (lentils, chickpeas, beans).
• Two of vegetables or salad as the base.
• Two of fish or meat.
• One wildcard day for leftovers, something quick or a treat.

With that skeleton, all you have to do is fill each slot with a specific dish. If you're unsure within a group, let the wheel choose among your options.

4. Turn the menu into a shopping list

Once you have the seven dishes, go over the ingredients and note what you're missing. This is the part that saves the most time and money: you buy exactly what you need, avoid the "there's nothing for dinner" and throw away far less food. If you shop online, add to the cart as you build the menu.

5. Tips to avoid getting bored

• Reuse: cook extra one day and use the leftovers the next in a different form (a stew today, a filling tomorrow).
• Keep 3 or 4 quick "wildcards" for days with no time: an omelette, pasta, a vegetable soup.
• Swap one fixed dish a month: try something new that chance suggests to break the routine without reinventing the whole week.
• Decide as a couple without arguing: let the tool suggest and all you have to say is "yes" or "another".

Planning the menu isn't for obsessive people: it's a gift of time and headspace. Ten minutes one day a week takes seven daily decisions off your plate, and dinner stops being a problem and goes back to being, simply, dinner.