It is Sunday evening, someone asks what is for dinner tomorrow, and you open a recipe site. Forty minutes later you have saved eleven things, planned none of them, and Monday is pasta again.

The problem was never a shortage of ideas.

If you are searching for what to cook this week, the pages that rank will hand you a stranger’s five dinners. Those meals do not know that Monday is football, that Wednesday you are home at half seven, or that there are three chicken thighs in the fridge with two days on them. The week decides what is cookable long before a recipe does. So decide the week first, and the dinners take ten minutes.

Look at the calendar before you look at a recipe

Every evening this week already has a shape. Some have forty-five minutes in them. Some have twenty. One or two have nothing, because somebody is late, out, or ferrying a child across town. Choosing a dinner before you know which evening it is for is how a lasagne ends up planned for parents’ evening.

So go through the seven nights and give each one a number.

• Twenty minutes. Something with a pan and no oven timer. Stir-fries, eggs, pasta, quesadillas.
• Forty-five minutes. A traybake, a curry from the jar you trust, anything that cooks while you do homework.
• A long evening. Usually only one a week, often Saturday or Sunday. This is where anything new goes.
• No cooking. Leftovers or a planned night off. Write it down as a plan, because it is one.

That example week came out at four dinners from the household’s own repertoire, one new dish and two nights nobody cooks. Nothing in it is clever. It is just decided in the right order.

What to cook this week, in about ten minutes in Chirpy

Here is the same Sunday in Chirpy. Open the household calendar and the week is already there: the football, the late shift, the parents’ evening, whoever put them in. Go to Kitchen, tap “Plan a meal” on Monday and type “stir”; the stir-fry you have made a dozen times is the first match. Wednesday gets Leftovers and Friday gets Takeout from the same picker, no recipe needed.

Then tap “Add this week’s meals” under the grocery list. Every ingredient from the planned dinners lands on it, grouped by aisle, on every phone in the house. The dinners also show up on the shared calendar, so nobody has to ask what is for dinner on Thursday, and the rest of the household gets a note that the plan changed.

All of that is on Chirpy Basic, which is free for the whole household, up to six people, no card.

Two nights go to whatever has to be used

Before you pick a single favourite, open the fridge. There is nearly always meat with a date on it, half a vegetable and an open tub of something. Those decide two of the week’s dinners for you, and they should go on the earliest short nights, because they have the fewest days left.

You do not need a recipe for this. A stir-fry, a fried rice, a frittata or a soup will take almost anything. Our guide to what can I cook with what I have goes through those dish shapes and how to pick one in a minute. And if the fridge is mostly a source of guilt on Fridays, the guide on how to stop wasting food at home shows where the money in the bin actually goes.

Fill the rest from what you already cook, oldest first

Most households cook from a list of about twenty dinners, and it feels like five because the same five come round. The cure for “we always have the same thing” is usually not a new recipe. It is the good one you forgot, the curry nobody has made since June.

The answer to “what should we have this week” is usually already in your house. It just has not been cooked in a while.

Chirpy keeps that list for you without asking you to keep score. Every time a recipe is planned it counts as cooked, so each card in the recipe box shows how many times you have made it, and each recipe page shows the date it was last on the plan. Under the week, “This week’s protein and variety” opens a card called Shake it up, which names the dinner you make most and one you have not had for a while. The recipe cards also carry their cooking time, so the twenty-minute nights are easy to fill.

If your twenty dinners are still in a cookbook, a notes app and three browser tabs, start with the guide on the save and organise recipes app. The short version: enter the ones you actually cook, not the ones you mean to.

One new recipe a week, on the longest evening

New recipes are where weeknight plans fail. They take twice as long the first time, need two ingredients you will never use again, and land on a Tuesday because Tuesday was empty on paper. Give the new one the long evening, and only one.

A food site’s weekly plan is genuinely better at one thing: handing you five dinners you have never heard of, if novelty is all you want. It cannot see your Monday, and on Chirpy Pro the Kitchen can: tap Suggest ideas and you get three dinner ideas for this week, varied across cuisines and following every household member’s diet and allergies. Tap one and it is a full recipe, which you can put on Saturday and send straight to the shopping list.

Found it somewhere else?

The recipe you want to try is often a photo of a magazine page or a screenshot from a friend. Our guide to how to add a recipe from a photo covers getting it in without retyping the ingredients.

What is in season in October, for that new one

Seasonal produce is the easiest way to choose the new dish, because it is what the shop has piled at the front and usually what costs least. The USDA’s SNAP-Ed Seasonal Produce Guide lists these for autumn, among others. We checked its fall page on 1 October 2026.

• For the oven: winter squash, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, potatoes, parsnips, beets, carrots, turnips.
• For the pan: Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Swiss chard, mushrooms, green beans.
• For afterwards: apples, pears, grapes, cranberries, pomegranates.

A squash risotto, a sheet pan of sausages with parsnips, a cabbage and bacon pasta. Each of those is a long-evening dish the first time and a forty-five-minute one by the third.

Keep the week that worked

The week you just planned is the start of next week’s. If the traybake went down well, it moves up the list. If the risotto took two hours, it goes back to a weekend slot or out of the box. That is the whole system, and it is why the decision gets faster each Sunday. Our longer guide on how to meal plan for the week covers what to do in week three, when it usually falls apart.

1. Calendar: give every night a time.
2. Fridge: two short nights use up what is there.
3. Repertoire: fill the rest from what you already cook, oldest first.
4. One new dish on the long evening, from what is in season.
5. Send it all to one shopping list, and shop once.

In Chirpy, step five is a single tap, and the next Sunday the cooked counts have already moved, so the Shake it up card has a new name on it.

Common questions