The Amamable blog

Weekly meal plan for a family of four — 15 meals and one shopping list

Five weekdays, three meals a day, all of it built from recipes you will find on this blog. Under the plan there is a combined shopping list — not the ingredients of fifteen recipes listed one after another, but a single list in which the milk from three dishes has already been added together. The switcher at the top rescales the whole week to 2, 4 or 6 people.

5weekdays
15meals
15 minmedian per dish
Servings

Rescales the whole week: the day cards stay as they are, and the shopping list at the bottom is recalculated ingredient by ingredient.

Monday

50 min in total
Scrambled eggs with bread — the finished dish on a plate, seen from above
Breakfast 15 min

Scrambled eggs with bread

Soft buttery scrambled eggs with open sandwiches of ham and mozzarella and slices of tomato. A recipe for 1 serving in 15 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients join your shopping list.

Salad with figs, goat's cheese and walnuts — the finished dish on a plate, seen from above
Supper 15 min

Salad with figs, goat's cheese and walnuts

Fresh figs, slices of goat's cheese and toasted walnuts on rocket, with a honey and mustard dressing. A recipe for 2 servings in 15 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients join your shopping list.

The salad with figs and goat's cheese looks like weekend food, yet it comes together in a quarter of an hour — one of the quickest suppers in the plan and a gentle way into the week.

Tuesday

50 min in total
Milk porridge with carrot and pecans — the finished dish on a plate, shot from above
Breakfast 20 min

Milk porridge with carrot and pecans

Porridge cooked in milk with grated carrot, pecans, cinnamon and maple syrup. A recipe for 2 servings in 20 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients go straight onto your shopping list.

Croissant with burrata and cured ham — the finished dish on a plate, seen from above
Supper 10 min

Croissant with burrata and cured ham

A crisp croissant with pesto, rocket, Parma ham and creamy burrata — no cooking at all. A recipe for 2 servings in 10 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients join your shopping list.

Porridge for four people means a litre of milk, so start it the night before and simply warm it through in the morning. Croissants bought on Monday will still be good on Tuesday.

Wednesday

60 min in total
Assorted open sandwiches — the finished dish on a plate, seen from above
Supper 15 min

Assorted open sandwiches

Classic open sandwiches with butter, hard cheese, ham, tomato and cucumber. A recipe for 2 servings in 15 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients join your shopping list.

One of the two longest days in the plan. Cut the chicken up and marinate it in the morning — that leaves nothing but the frying in the evening, eight minutes at the pan.

Thursday

50 min in total
Tofu in soy and tomato sauce with green beans and rice — the finished dish on a plate, shot from above
Dinner 20 min

Tofu in soy and tomato sauce with green beans and rice

Tofu coated in potato flour and fried in olive oil, in a soy and tomato sauce, with rice and green beans, sprinkled with sesame seeds. A recipe for 2 servings in 20 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients go straight onto your shopping list.

Mango pancakes — the finished dish on a plate, seen from above
Supper 15 min

Mango pancakes

Mango pancakes on wholemeal flour, with ricotta and mango purée, scattered with sesame seeds. A recipe for 1 serving in 15 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients join your shopping list.

Press the tofu the moment you get home, before you start anything else. The mango pancakes take a quarter of an hour, so supper needs nothing done in advance.

Friday

60 min in total
Savoury French toast — the finished dish on a plate, shot from above
Supper 15 min

Savoury French toast

Slices of bread in egg and breadcrumbs, fried in butter, with melted cheese, pepper and gherkins. A recipe for 1 serving in 15 minutes — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients go straight onto your shopping list.

Friday clears the fridge: the hard cheese for the toast is left over from Wednesday's sandwiches, and the Greek yoghurt goes into both the morning porridge and the wraps.

You can put a week like this together yourself, in two minutes

Amamable builds the plan from your own recipes and merges the ingredients into a single shopping list on its own. No AI — the same week always comes out the same.

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Shopping list for the whole week

4 servings

Every ingredient from the fifteen recipes, added up and grouped the way the shop is laid out. Tick things off as you go round, or print the list — and if you are cooking for a different number of people, the switcher at the top will recalculate every line.

  • Meat and fish
  • Fruit and vegetables
  • Dairy and eggs
  • Bakery
  • Store cupboard and the rest

How to plan a week so that it actually works

Start with the dinners and fit the rest around them. Dinner is the only meal that genuinely has to be planned — in most households breakfasts and suppers revolve around the same handful of dishes. In this plan the five dinners rest on four different sources of protein: minced pork and beef, fish, poultry and tofu. Poultry comes round twice, but once as chicken with vegetables and noodles and once as wraps with beetroot — beyond the protein the two have nothing in common. That is not decoration: a week in which the same ham comes back three times has gone stale by Thursday.

The shopping list matters more than the plan. A meal plan without a combined list leaves all the work to you: fifteen recipes are fifteen lists you then have to add up in your head in front of the dairy shelf. That is why the list below is a single one and has already merged what repeats — the garlic from five dishes, the eggs from four, the Greek yoghurt from three.

Rescale the plan to your household, not the other way round. Everything is set for four people by default, because that is what most people ask for. But a family of three should not be buying a quarter too much simply because the plan was written for somebody else — the switcher recalculates every line separately and rounds it so that you can actually measure it out in the kitchen.

Rule allergies out at the planning stage, not at the table. This menu is an example and knows nothing about your household. If someone at home avoids gluten or nuts, swapping a dish after the fact is the worst possible moment — by then the shopping is already done. In Amamable the allergens of everyone in the household add up, and the plan simply skips any dish that somebody at the table cannot eat.

And for the weekend — something to bake

15 min
Apricot clafoutis — seen from above
Bake 15 min

Apricot clafoutis

A French baked pudding: apricots under a loose vanilla batter, scattered with flaked almonds. A recipe for 12 servings — plan it in Amamable and the ingredients join your shopping list.

Frequently asked questions

How do I put together a weekly meal plan for a family?

Pick the dinners first — they are the only meals that call for a decision — and make sure the source of protein does not repeat two days running. Then choose breakfasts and suppers from the few dishes you make anyway. Last of all, add the ingredients of every dish up into one shopping list; that is the step that decides whether the plan survives to Wednesday. In Amamable you tick the days, and the plan and the list are built automatically from your own recipes.

How many people is this meal plan for, and how do I rescale it?

Four people by default: 5 weekdays with three meals each, so 15 dishes. The switcher above the shopping list rescales the whole week to 2, 4 or 6 people — every line is recalculated separately and rounded so that you can measure it out in the kitchen: grams and millilitres to the nearest five, whole items to whole numbers.

How do I make a shopping list from a weekly meal plan?

Write out the ingredients of every dish you have planned, scale each one to your number of people, then merge the duplicates — but only the ones that can be merged. 200 g and 300 g of flour make 500 g of flour, whereas a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of oil never add up, even though the unit is the same. The list on this page was built in exactly that way, straight from the recipes, so its numbers cannot drift away from what is in the days above.

Does this meal plan take food allergies into account?

No — it is an example plan and it does not know who eats what in your house. It contains, among others, gluten, milk, eggs, fish, nuts, soya, sesame and mustard, so with an allergy at home you will have to swap dishes by hand. Amamable does that for you: you mark each household member's allergens and the plan skips the dishes any one of them appears in. In a family everyone's allergens add up, and the filter covers all 14 allergens from EU regulation 1169/2011.

Stop planning the week on a scrap of paper

Tick the days, choose how many people you are cooking for and collect a finished plan together with the shopping list. Planning, the calendar, the list and the allergen filter are free, with no time limit.

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