my (real life) plant-based meal plan

Here's what I planned, and what actually hit the table.

I still find it helpful to look at another plant-based family’s meal plan. It gives me ideas and offers comfort, knowing that most people are making easy meals, improvising and adjusting as real life interferes with plans. It's easy to assume other households (vegan or not) are perfecting dinner every night, with everyone loving every dish.

I guarantee that's not the case! Dinner plans often fail, and even as a trained plant-based chef, I frequently find myself staring into the fridge wondering, "What are we going to eat?"

There are many evenings when I dread deciding and making dinner. Meal plans help me immensely and reduce the mental load of daily household decision-making. I stick the plan on the fridge so everyone knows what’s for dinner.

Today, I wanted to share my meal plan from last week, summarizing my initial plans, how I prepped, and what actually ended up on the table. I hope this comparison reassures you that you’re doing an excellent job, no matter where you are on your plant-based journey or how many of your meals are fully vegan.

Notes

The Weekly Dinner Plan template below can be downloaded here. I like to organize my week according to meal type but there is no other reason for this except it works for me and I’ve seen it work for others too, especially when starting on a plant-based diet.

I like to lead my meal planning with one question “What’s the vegetable?”

My meals are veg-centric. By this I mean I like to pick the star vegetable first and then add the grains, beans, pasta, nuts, and seeds after. You can read more about this food philosophy here.

THE PLAN

Here is a picture of my weekly meal plan from last week. Please excuse my handwriting; it's not my strong suit!

Monday: Sweet and sour cauliflower bowls from Plant-Based Delicious. I love this bowl because it offers loads of protein and highlights my favorite veggie: cauliflower. The vegetable here is clearly cauliflower!

Tuesday: This roasted red pepper pasta is in regular rotation. I planned to toss some canned chickpeas in with the pasta cooking water and pair everything with roasted asparagus. The leading vegetable here is roasted red peppers.

Wednesday: The plan was tofu shakshuka from Plant-Based Delicious and we were going to sop up the zesty tomato sauce with freshly baked sourdough from a local bakery. The leading veggie here is tomatoes (even if they’re canned!).

Thursday: These stuffed zucchini are a massive hit so we have them regularly. Zucchini is the veg!

Friday: I planned to bake some tofu, cook some brown rice, and make this ceasar salad dressing and massage it into a big head of curly kale and stuff all of this into large sprouted wraps with some hot sauce and sliced cucumber. Kale was the leading veg.

THE REALITY

Monday: I stuck to the plan! On Sunday night I chopped the cauliflower, thawed the edamame in the fridge, and made the quinoa.

Tuesday: I think this pasta sounds hard but if you have roasted peppers, it’s easy to whip up. I roasted two red peppers on Monday night so I was ready to go but I added broccoli to the pasta cooking liquid instead of roasting asparagus. I didn’t add chickpeas to the pasta water but instead added a dollop of hummus to each bowl because I already had hummus in the fridge.

Wednesday: Shakshuka and dinner fail! I was tired and it was way too hot outside. Instead we ordered dinner from a local poke bowl spot and scrapped my initial plans. Read about my latest poke bowl obsession here and how you can make your own.

Thursday: We did have stuffed zucchini boats but I realized I forgot to check that I had all the ingredients. I didn’t have salsa but I did have tomatoes. So I subbed 6 chopped Roma tomatoes for the salsa — it worked out fine. I also only had three zucchinis (not six which the recipe calls for), so we had leftover rice filling. I paired the zucchini with toasted sourdough (from Wednesday) and used it to scoop up the cashew sour cream and bits of filling that fell out of the zucchini.

Friday: We had wraps but they weren’t caesar! I stuffed the wraps with tofu scramble (just the scramble not the other bowl components), mashed avocado, leftover rice from Thursday, lettuce, carrot ribbons, and hummus. They were delicious!

However, Caesar wraps are still in my mind, let me know if you’d be interested in this recipe!

Was this helpful and would you like more meal plan summaries? Let me know!