Sometimes life is better in the flow. But sometimes people prefer meal plans, as they know what to buy and cook, and it avoids food waste.
Plant-Based Meal Prep is a beautifully designed book of over 60 recipes for breakfasts, mains, snacks and designs, with tags for allergies and get-started guides to walk you through the basics. The easy meal plans take the guesswork of what to make, and there is nutritional info throughout.
Read up on food safety for people & pets (many human foods are unsafe around animal friends).
Recipes include:
- Creamy pasta with broccoli
- Lentil and black bean nachos
- Buffalo Sauce
- Satay sauce
- Mustard balsamic dressing
The book also feature Prep Day Duos, where you make two meals each day, to serve later in the week:
- Rice and beans (and red curry with lentils and potatoes)
- White bean burgers with sweet potatoes (and Mexican quinoa)
- Creamy tofu and rice (with tofu satay)
More Simple Vegan Meal Plans
The Veg Space is a super recipe blog by a trained chef, who also offers a free four-week meal plan, complete with printable shopping list. Just print it off (at the library if you don’t have a printer) and enjoy a whole month of budget-friendly family meals. Recipes (all on her blog) include:
- Creamy wild mushroom one-pot gnocchi
- Tuscan bean stew
- Vegan sausage casserole with beans
- Vegan cottage pie with colcannon
- Creamy courgette curry
- Vegan stew with ale & pearl barley
- Black bean & jalapeno burger
- Vegan toad-in-the-hole
- Chipotle black bean chilli
- Speedy spicy chilli bean burritos
- Chickpea & butternut curry
- Vegan moussaka
Home-Cooked Roots offers several vegan meal plans based on number of people and budget, with full cost savings. Full of Plants offers a good e-book, packed with easy recipes and shopping lists.
Veggies Don’t Bite offers a super-simple 7-day meal plan with all the recipes on one blog post, so you can just print and cook and eat. No need to sign up to newsletters or visit different pages to find the simple meal ideas.
Subscription Plant-Based Meal Plans
Rainbow Plant Life offers meal plans, from one of the world’s most popular food bloggers. Rather than simple boring meals or greasy take-outs, these meal plans are designed around the same base ingredients so you have no waste, and with seasonal weekly menus, grocery lists and one-day-a-week mini preps, to save time during the week.
The plan includes easy swaps for allergies and short-cut emergency meal ideas, when life goes awry and you can’t stick to the meal plan, for whatever reason. The plans work for all-size households and cost less than the cost of a latte per week. So if you order takeout once a week, this pays for itself in no time.
Meal Mentor has a free trial, then sign up for an affordable plant-based meal plan with shopping list. Created by a best-selling cookbook author, she has stripped everything down to make it simple for anyone. These meals are extra healthy with all nutrient information and you can just enter your portions (one to four people) and it generates a shopping list that you can print and pop in your bag for the store.
You can also swap out recipes for others in the app, or customise to suit personal preferences or dietary needs (many meals can be made soy, gluten and nut-free). And a portion from each membership donation goes to elephant rescue!
Easy Vegan Meal Plan offers a good online plan by Sam Turnbull, one of the world’s best-selling cookbook authors, who always specialises in affordable simple meals that anyone can make.
Eco-Friendly Meal Planners & Shopping Lists
These eco-friendly meal planners are printed on recycled paper, to plan all your favourite plant-based meals and recipes and shopping lists. They’re also beautifully illustrated and sent in plastic-free packaging.
Before cooking, read up on food safety for people & pets.
The meal planner chart (with optional magnet for the fridge) covers all three daily meals, with
52 tear-off pages and a generous A4 size. The bold stripe design makes a lovely gift to students or busy parents. Use with the illustrated recycled recipe journals.
The smaller A5 meal planner pad has a shopping list function too, and again is sold with an optional magnet, to stick on the fridge.
The pink and red meal planner has 50 tear-off pages and a shopping list, to help reduce food waste.
The weekly grocery shop pad has 50 tear-off pages, and six sections to take with you to the grocery:
- Fruits & Vegetables
- Bakery
- Chilled & Frozen
- Canned & Cupboard
- Health, Beauty & Cleaning
- Other
Beautiful Recycled (blank) Recipe Journals
These beautiful blank recipe journals are spiral-bound, and printed on recycled paper. To keep all your favourite plant-based recipes together. As well as having gorgeous designs to pass down recipes through generations, they are printed in the UK.
Before cooking, read up on food safety for people & pets.
The 128 pages are easy-to-write on, and the journals also have extra special touches. Like handy cooking conversions and a ‘build your own index’ page. All with beautiful illustrations throughout. The book is also designed to lay flat, so perfect for lefties too!
