Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.
Question:
I appreciate the Map of Cooking for a meal, but I have a hard time creating a week of plant based meals. I have a couple of go-to recipes but have a hard time stringing them into a logical plan.?
— Robert Morgan
Answer:
Oh, that's great. Robert. Actually, I guess it's been about four years ago I did a live event specifically on meal planning and plant-based meal planning. Um, so you can always look that up in our live events if you use the search option here, um, to be able to search out, uh, meal planning. I think it'll probably come up as a link for the video for it. But the best advice I can give you on, um, you know, meal planning for the week basically, is to be able to look at your recipes and make sure that you're using multiple, you're using the same ingredient multiple times, right? So if you're going to say use, I mean an easy example would be onions, but right, so let's just say asparagus, right? So asparagus is something that you might use half a bunch of, you know, or, um, you know, a quarter of a bunch of, so you can, um, you know, use maybe half the bunch in, uh, like, uh, risotto and use asparagus that's been added to it. Um, and then you can use the other half chopped up into a salad or something like that, or made into, um, you know, put into pasta at the same time as well too. So, oh, Patrick just linked the event there. Thanks so much, Patrick. Um, so yeah, as far as, um, you know, planning ahead wise, I was trying to make sure that you're using the same ingredient multiple ways that saves space in your fridge, but it also saves waste at the same time. And then think about what you can do to be able to plan ahead for yourself later in the week as well. So, um, if you know you're gonna have like say a lasagna on Friday night, can you make that lasagna ahead of time? So Friday it's just really easy where you can just throw it in the oven. Can you make a second one to be able to put in the freezer to be able to use later on, maybe in a month or so to be able to have another easy go-to kind of recipe? So that's kind of, uh, you know, what I try to look at when I'm doing, um, meal planning is, uh, looking at, um, ingredients that are in season, how to use them in multiple recipes throughout the week, um, at the same time.
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