Six Nights, Sorted

SIX NIGHTS, SORTED — the seventh is left empty on purpose.

Here is how a meal plan actually dies.

You plan seven dinners. Six of them happen. On the seventh night something goes wrong — you're late, you're tired, someone's ill, the chicken was off — and you order a takeaway.

And then you feel that you have failed the plan.

And a plan you have failed is a plan you stop opening. So the whole thing collapses. Not because six dinners went wrong. Because one did.

SO THIS PLANNER HAS SIX SLOTS. NOT SEVEN.

The seventh night is built in as empty. It's for leftovers, or a takeaway, or toast, or someone else cooking, or nothing at all.

It is not a gap in the plan. It is part of the plan.

Which means the night you were always going to have anyway is now a night you planned to have — and a plan you haven't broken is a plan you'll open again next week.

AND IT SAVES YOU MONEY, QUIETLY

Most food waste is bought, not cooked.

You shop for seven dinners. You cook five or six. The ingredients for the ones that never happened sit in the fridge going soft, and then go in the bin — and you paid for every one of them.

Shopping for six fixes this almost entirely, because six is roughly what you were ever going to cook. And on the night you don't cook, you eat something already in the house. Which costs you nothing extra at all.

WHAT'S INSIDE — 96 hyperlinked pages

PART ONE · BEFORE YOU BEGIN (twenty minutes, once)

• Your Six — six dinners you can cook without looking anything up
• The Staples
• The Seventh Night — the page that explains the whole idea
• Allergies & Needs

PART TWO · THE WEEKS

• 26 weekly spreads. Six dinners on the left, and the gold panel that is not a seventh row
• The grocery list they produce on the right — cross-linked both ways
• Every gold panel taps straight back to The Seventh Night, so the idea never gets lost

PART THREE · THE SHOP

• How to Shop for Six — why most waste is bought
• 16 grocery lists · The Standing List

PART FOUR · THE KITCHEN

• 6 recipe cards
• THE WORLD KITCHEN — three complete recipes, written out in full:

★ LARB GAI (Laos) — one of the fastest good dinners on earth. Twenty minutes, one pan. The toasted rice powder is not optional; it's the texture and half the flavour. ★ CHICKEN KATSU CURRY (Japan) — the single most reliable way to make a household happy on a Tuesday. Pour the sauce over only half the chicken; drowning the lot is the commonest mistake. ★ CHILAQUILES (Mexico) — built out of yesterday's tortillas. The whole dish turns on ninety seconds.

Metric and imperial throughout.

UNDATED — start any week, skip a fortnight, come back in the autumn.

WORKS WITH — GoodNotes, Notability, Noteshelf, Xodo, Samsung Notes and any PDF annotation app, on iPad and Android tablets. Also prints beautifully.

INSTANT DIGITAL DOWNLOAD — 3 PDF files. No physical item. Personal use only.

Six is a plan. Seven is a trap.

— Arwign Planners