Gaby Chapman - The Plan Buy Cook Book

For our families:

Eddie, Lachlan and Lucy Simon, Luca, Alex and Evan and all the PlanBuyCook app users

Who Is This Book For?

Do you panic about whats for dinner every night at 5 pm?

Do you shop for food three or more times a week?

Are you tired of serving the same meals over and over again to your family?

Have you got a fridge full of food, but nothing to cook?

Are you sick of buying food that you throw out?

Are you procrastibaking instead of getting on with the main meal?

Lets face it: you have hit the wall, just like Gaby had before she met Jen and they started their meal-planning app PlanBuyCook.

You want to provide nutritious food for your family but are finding the daily dinner a grind. You might even have a fussy eater to satisfy.

You work either part-time or full-time, or you are a stay-at-home parent struggling with cooking the family meals.

You want to cut down your food waste and cut out multiple trips to the supermarket each week. Saving money on your shopping is a bonus.

You need a plan to manage the week that eases your mental load.

This book is for families everywhere who are struggling with the process of getting a healthy, tasty meal on the table every night at a reasonable hour.

Our Dinner Done = 4+2+1 formula will cut your cooking time in half. It will most likely change your life, like it has for Gaby and for so many others. We hope it will lead to a lifetime of fuss-free planning, buying, cooking and eating habits for you and your family. Plan once, eat well all week. Dinner Done.

Procrastibaking: verb, the art of putting off cooking the evening meal and baking instead.

Contents

Meet Jen and Gaby, the team behind PlanBuyCook and the Dinner Done = 4+2+1 formula.

Gaby is a mother of three boys, and she always panicked about what was for dinner. She was running her own business and juggling her kids activities with work and family life and struggling with all of them. Her cookbook collection was of no help: too many ingredients or too complicated methods for weeknight cooking. She would ring her friends at 5 pm some nights in a fluster trying to gather other peoples ideas, then frantically run to the supermarket to buy the ingredients, inevitably forgetting something. Add a fussy eater to the mix, and it was a recipe for disaster. Dinner was served up late each night to tired and cranky kids. That was, until she met Jen.

Jen is a chef, master meal planner, mother of two and the most organised person ever. She has worked as a restaurant chef, in large-scale catering and as a personal chef. In short, she knows how to get a meal on the table without too much stress. Once she had children, she needed to adjust her cooking for the everyday: food that tasted great but was also good for growing kids. Restaurant food with loads of components is fine for special occasions, but hopeless for weeknights. So she worked on ways to simplify recipes, while also teaching the mums in her mums group how to greatly reduce food waste, store food well and save time in the kitchen.

A chance conversation with a group of school mums about the hassle of the evening meal led Jen and Gaby to build an app to help solve the nightly Whats for dinner? dilemma. Together, they built PlanBuyCook, one of Apples top-selling meal-planning apps. They have now brought together their know-how in this book to give families a simple formula to get dinner done every night without fuss and without breaking the bank.

Feeding a family is quite a shock. It turns out they need to eat three times a day (or more), for the best part of 20+ years. Who knew?

Not everyone is born into a family that knows how to cook well (neither of us were). And, importantly, very few families have any idea how to really plan meals and cook with ease, how to produce tasty, healthy meals every day from the food in their house without fuss and in a timely way. Thats where this book comes in.

Home cooking doesnt need to be stressful or difficult. This is a book about how to simplify your life and cut down the time spent on weekday cooking, using a proven formula for success. It will take you from when your kids are young through to teaching them to plan, shop to a budget and cook for themselves by the time they leave home.

This is not your typical cookbook with fancy breakfasts and delicious desserts. For a start, it just has dinner recipes. But it also has information on banishing the 5 pm panic and the daily dinner grind forever. It will cut your shopping and weekday cooking time in half and improve your cooking skills. Most importantly, our 4+2+1 formula makes getting dinner done simple.

We show you how to get dinner done in the following sections:

THE BASICS: The 4+2+1 formula.

PLAN: Getting started, seasonal sample meal plans and how to plan your cooking week.

BUY: How to shop and save, pantry and refrigerator staples and kitchen tools.

COOK: We bring it all together with 80+ recipes for meals everyone will enjoy, in different categories: .

Gaby takes you through the section.

You might choose to read the book section by section, or drop in and out of various parts at the front. You might even take the basics of the Plan section and apply the 4+2+1 formula to your own recipes.

You might be like Gaby and have a million cookbooks but nothing to cook for dinner. Or you could be like Jen, who can glance at a food photo and know how to cook it. But getting dinner done is neither about your cooking ability nor the number of cookbooks you own. It is about being a little bit organised, having some meal-planning know-how, using recipes everyone enjoys, having the ingredients at home to cook them, and getting savvy about cooking to match your lifestyle.

Dont worry if your kids are now teenagers, or you dont have any children. It is never too late to learn good food habits, how to cook from scratch, time-savers in the kitchen and life skills like food budgeting. Our foolproof formula works for households of one through to larger or multi-generational families.

You can take it further by downloading the PlanBuyCook app, which will allow you to plan your meals, double freezable meals, generate your shopping list like magic and scale each dinner to match your household size, from 1 to 10 serves.

Reading this book is your first step towards freedom from dinner being a burden and into a world where the evening meal is just a habit and a small part of what you do quickly and simply every day, no matter how much chaos is going on around you.

Some people may be wondering why home cooking is so important. Here are a few great reasons why you should cook more at home, and how the 4+2+1 formula can help you get organised.