A Mealime-style week of dinners: 5 quick recipes, one grocery list

What made Mealime’s plans easy

Mealime closes on October 21, 2026. What many people will miss is not one particular recipe but the routine: pick a handful of short recipes, get one grocery list, cook without thinking about it. The trick behind that routine is ingredient overlap. If two dinners share half a cabbage and a pack of tortillas, nothing wilts in the drawer on Friday.

Below is a week built on that idea, using recipes from our own catalog. These are RecipesFinder recipes, not Mealime’s. Mealime’s recipe collection is moving to Albertsons’ Meals Hub; read what moves to Meals Hub and what does not.

The plan: five dinners for two

That is 140 minutes of cooking across the week. Every recipe is written for two servings; use the servings selector on each recipe page to scale it for three, four or six, and the quantities update.

One grocery list for the week

Totals for all five recipes at two servings each. Check your pantry before you go: most of the spices are used in small amounts.

Produce

• Mushrooms, 500 g (about 1 lb 2 oz)
• Cabbage, 200 g (a small wedge)
• Bell pepper, 200 g (one large)
• Cherry tomatoes, 150 g (about 1 cup)
• Avocados, 2 (one ripe for Thursday, one firmer for Friday)
• Limes, 3 (you need about 4 tablespoons of juice)
• Onion, 1
• Garlic, 2 cloves

Meat and dairy

• Boneless chicken breast, 700 g (about 1½ lb)
• Single (light) cream, 100 ml
• Plain yogurt, 100 g
• Vegetarian hard cheese, 20 g

Pantry and bakery

• Small tortillas, 12
• Long-grain rice, 240 g dry (about 1¼ cups)
• Pasta, 180 g dry (about 6 oz)
• Canned black beans, 240 g drained (about one 15-oz can)
• Canned corn, 300 g drained (about 2 cups)
• Ground cumin, 3 teaspoons; smoked paprika, 2½ teaspoons
• Olive oil, 5 tablespoons; salt and black pepper

Cook the week in the right order

• Chicken first. Raw chicken keeps one to two days in the refrigerator, according to FoodSafety.gov’s storage chart. That is why both chicken dinners are on Monday and Tuesday. If you shop earlier, freeze the chicken and thaw it in the refrigerator.
• Shred the cabbage once. Shred all 200 g on Tuesday, use half and keep the rest in a covered container for Thursday’s tacos.
• Mushrooms midweek. Keep them in their original pack or a paper bag in the refrigerator, and cook them on Wednesday and Thursday.
• Cook rice fresh each time. Both rice dinners cook their own batch. Cooked rice should be cooled quickly and eaten within a day, so making Monday’s rice for Friday is not a shortcut.
• One can of corn, two meals. Open the corn on Thursday, refrigerate the rest in a covered container and finish it in Friday’s bowl.

Vegetarian version

Swap the two chicken nights and the week stays almost as tidy:

• Monday: sesame tofu rice bowl instead of the fajita bowl. It still uses the rice and lime.
• Tuesday: chickpea & cabbage tacos instead of the chicken tacos. Same tortillas, cabbage, cumin, paprika and lime.

Drop the chicken and yogurt from the list; add 300 g firm tofu, a cucumber, soy sauce, maple syrup, fresh ginger, sesame seeds, a can of chickpeas and tahini. The other three dinners are already vegetarian.

Keep the plan where you can find it

Every recipe page has a Print recipe button and a copy-link button. If you used Mealime on an iPhone, you can also paste the links into FoodKeep, which keeps the recipes in a cookbook and adds their ingredients to a grocery list grouped by aisle. FoodKeep has no meal-plan calendar, so a cookbook called “This week” does that job.

A note on our recipes: they are written with AI assistance and have not yet been independently kitchen-tested. Read our editorial note, check doneness with a thermometer and trust your own cooking judgment.

A few good questions