Meal planning and grocery shopping can be completely overwhelming. You know you want to eat well that week and enjoy the food you have in your fridge and pantry, but where do you start?

A few years ago, I began to think of my groceries like I do my wardrobe: I want everything I buy to be able to mix and match very easily. I’m a solid jeans-and-tee kind of girl, but I mix it up with boots, jackets, bags, and accessories. Knowing that makes it easy for me to get dressed in the morning, just like this can make it easy for you to grocery shop and cook.

If you know what your foundation pieces are (carb-based dishes combined with veggies are to my weekly meals as jeans and tees are to my wardrobe), it removes the guesswork and is fun to build and play off of.

The point of this approach is to help bring you back to basics and to make cooking for yourself uncomplicated. It’s to help you get into the habit of creating your own meals and have the comfort of knowing you have food you truly like stored in your kitchen. Most of the resulting recipes are barely recipes—it’s mostly assembling different ingredients together. Once you get into a flow, you’ll see your creativity blossom and you’ll start to add more ambitious recipes. These are not hosting meals. These are for busy, hungry, efficiency-craving people (and if I’m being honest, I started shopping and planning this way when I was single, so single girls, I really have you in mind for this!).

So where do you really start?

Think of your favorite meals to eat and look at the common thread. My favorite meals are cozy pastas, avocado toast, salads, wraps, and grain bowls. My obvious common thread here is carbs. I don’t feel satiated unless my meal is anchored by carbohydrates—whether that be fruit, oatmeal, bread, potatoes, rice, quinoa, pasta, etc. I am happy (both mentally and physically) as long as my meal has carbs.

Then what?

Choose 3-4 favorite foods from the following groups:

Carb/grain bases
Vegetables
Fruits
Fat sources
Protein sources
Accessories (sauces, dips, dressings, chips, cheese, bacon sprinkles, hemp seeds, sesame seeds, whatever you like to sprinkle on or add for crunch/texture)

Then?

Think about how these foods can combine in different ways with a simple switch of seasoning or preparation. Make a list of meals you can make combining one item from each group.

Now?

It’s time to make your grocery list. I like to divide my list into halves. On the left, I write out my actual grocery needs and write them in order based on where they’re located in the store. (I always start in produce and work my way around from there!) On the right, I write out the meals and snacks I can create based on the ingredients on the left side (plus what I know I have at home). These are loose ideas of how they could combine, not ideas I absolutely must stick to.

Below is an example of the list I made this week. (Pardon the terrible iPad handwriting!)

My grocery shopping was easy and straightforward...minus all the new snack products not on this list that I just *had* to buy. I mean, someone has to try them and it’s def going to be me.

Below are links to meals I actually made based off my mix-and-match grocery approach! The best part about this approach is that it’s very little cooking and mostly assembling, so you have easy, healthy meals in no time.

Monday & Thursday morning: Mango Cookie Smoothie