I have simplified almost every area of my life, but I have always struggled with simplified eating.

Meal planning, shopping for groceries, and cooking have always seemed like a collective chore that I could never figure out how to simplify.

Things I’ve tried:

• Menu planning
• Meal prep
• Shopping once every 2 weeks
• Shopping weekly
• Shopping daily
• Meal delivery service
• Growing & preserving my own food
• Buying farm raised beef and pork (1/2 cow and 1/2 pig)
• Eating 2 meals a day instead of 3 (less is more, right?)
• Making favorite go-to meals on a rotation
• Theming days of the week (meatless Monday, taco Tuesday, etc.)

I never really had a breakthrough moment like I did when simplifying other areas of my life.

That moment where I could say: “Yes, this is it! This will make my life better!”

Until now.

Up to this point, some things sort of worked. Others didn’t work at all. Overall, meal time remained a chore that I didn’t love.

I have always attributed my struggles to the fact that I don’t love cooking. I would rather be almost anywhere than the kitchen. I have often thought that it’s a pity humans need to eat 3 times a day. So much wasted time…

Doubling Down on Simple Eating

With recent warnings from my doctor that I am pre-diabetic I have started paying much more attention to what I am eating.

After giving up on simplifying my life in the kitchen, I have renewed my efforts to find a simplified way to manage meals. I’m doubling down and determined to find a solution to simple eating!

I got very excited when I came across a blog post by Jennifer Burger on her blog Simply + Fiercely. The title of her post is Simple Eating: How I Save Money, Reduce Stress + Spend Less Time In The Kitchen and I’ll link it here.

What On Earth Is A Capsule Kitchen?

What caught my eye was that Jennifer’s post mentions a capsule kitchen.

A what??

As a minimalist, and someone who has embraced simple living, I introduced the capsule wardrobe years ago. The capsule wardrobe was my breakthrough moment for simplifying my closet!

Could a capsule kitchen be the breakthrough needed to simplify mealtimes?

The Capsule Wardrobe

If you don’t know what a capsule wardrobe is I’m sending you straight to Courtney Carver’s Project 333 Minimalist Fashion Challenge here. She is the queen of the capsule wardrobe!

This is where I learned to dress with 33 items in my closet for 3 months (thus the 333).

Every season, I set up my capsule wardrobe with 33 mix and match items. Most items stay the same no matter the season. These are my base items:

• black pants
• jeans
• short sleeve top
• long sleeve top
• sleeveless top
• light sweater
• sweatshirt
• blazer

I change out other pieces of clothing, depending on the season. Shorts come out in summer, turtlenecks in the winter. You get the idea.

The end goal is that I have my go-to wardrobe items. I mix it up every 3 months by making some swaps to keep my outfits seasonal and fun.

Getting dressed is simple. Keeping up on laundry is simple.

I had to explore how this idea could translate to the kitchen!

The Capsule Kitchen

Just like the capsule wardrobe has base items (black pants & jeans) that stay no matter the season, the capsule kitchen has staple items that are always on hand.

In the same way clothes are swapped out seasonally (fall sweaters & summer shorts), seasonal fruits and veggies and sale items can be used with the staple items in your capsule kitchen to create a variety of meals.

The capsule kitchen is made up of go-to food staples you always have on hand and seasonal/sales items that can be used with your staples to prepare a meal.

Jennifer takes the capsule kitchen one step further by suggesting you adopt a food “uniform”. This is simply a style of eating, or types of dishes, that are your go-to meals.

Jennifer chose stir fry, salad, bowls, and tacos. These are the dishes she makes regularly, although her ingredients change.

Why had I not thought of this sooner?

Stocking the Capsule Kitchen

The base items you choose to keep will depend entirely on how you like to eat.

We all have certain types of meals and ways of eating that appeal to us the most, and best fit our lifestyles.

Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. I make packed lunches for work. I try to stay away from meals based around carbs (like potatoes, pasta and breads) and avoid added sugar. I want meals that come together quickly, and want every meal to include veggies.

My go-to meals (or my food uniform) are:

1. breakfast dishes
2. gourmet salads
3. soups
4. stir fry, and
5. simple dinners consisting of meat with veggie sides.

My go-to list looks like this:

• A freezer stocked with farm-grown meat and fresh-frozen seafood. We buy 1/2 cow or pig at a time and a chest of fresh salmon that we divide and freeze ourselves.
• Seasonal fruit and vegetables
• Leafy greens for salads
• Diary: cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, kefir, milk, cream, butter (farm girl loves her dairy!)
• Farm fresh eggs. We have a local source for these.
• Seasonings: herbs, spices, oils, & vinegars.
• Nuts & Seeds: chia, pumpkin, sunflower, coconut, cashews, walnuts, pecans, almonds, Brazil nuts, flax, etc.

Because I don’t want to eat sandwiches every day due to the carbs in bread, I rely heavily on salads for my packed lunches.

This means my capsule kitchen must always have greens available. Every shopping trip I will buy spinach, arugula, or a variety of lettuce depending on what is available and the prices.

I top my salads with fresh fruit, veggies, meats, cheese, nuts or seeds, or herbs. I use olive oil and vinegar as dressing. These are stash items that I use almost every day so as soon as I run out, I know I will replace these things.

I don’t need to know how I am going to use them in my next meal, I can just trust that I will want to use them in my upcoming meals.

Shopping For The Capsule Kitchen

There is no shopping for meals when using a capsule kitchen. I love this idea because:

1. I am never organized enough to have meals planned ahead of time.
2. When I do plan meals, the week never goes the way I expect and the ingredients end up going to waste. (I planned a fresh salad and ended up eating out!)
3. With the price of groceries these days, I like to buy whatever is on sale, not what I had in mind for a specific meal.
4. Sweetie also shops and cooks and we would have to co-ordinate everything – that gets tricky.
5. I live in a rural area so shopping is a planned trip to the city. I can’t just pop out to the shops and grab that one item I need to complete a meal. This can quickly derail a meal if I have planned poorly or missed something when “meal shopping”.
6. I don’t love shopping and will put it off as long as is humanly possible, which can make meal planning a challenge. 🙂

Instead of shopping for meals, you keep a list of your go-to items that are running low.

With the sole exception of eggs, most of my go-to items are a category rather than a specific item. This gives lots of flexibility both when shopping and when making meals.

For example, nuts and seeds is a broad category. If I have run out of pecans and peanuts are on sale, I get peanuts. If my apple cider vinegar has run out, I can replace it with a red wine vinegar if I wish to change things up.

This allows for variety in my diet while still sticking to the simplicity of the original capsule kitchen staple items.

Cooking In The Capsule Kitchen

Signature Dining

The capsule kitchen pushes you towards a signature dining style. By design, it will promote the creation of certain types of dishes.

A meat and potato family, will stock their capsule kitchen very differently than a pasta loving family. As a result, the meals they create will vary significantly.

Meat and potato family might regularly enjoy:

• Steak and potatoes
• Stew
• Pot roast

The pasta family is more likely to have:

• Spaghetti & meatballs
• Lasagna
• Mac and cheese

From my own capsule kitchen some signature dishes have come to include:

• Breakfast dishes (I did mention that is is my favorite meal, right?)
  • Omelets
  • Breakfast bowls
  • Overnight oats
  • Smoothies
  • Ham & eggs
  • Steak & eggs
  • Bacon & eggs
  • Avocado toast
  • Eggs poached in tomato
• Gourmet Salads
• Homemade soups
• Stir fry
  • Teriyaki salmon
  • Pepper steak
  • Beef & broccoli
  • Chicken & veggies
• Meat dinners with veggie sides
  • Roasts with veggie sides
  • BBQ with veggie sides
  • Salmon & fiddleheads

Even though the capsule kitchen staple items are limited in comparison to what I used to keep in my kitchen, I have a lot of variety in my meal choices. They are all meals that I love and that are easy to pull together!

Creative Cooking

It is counter-intuitive but restricting ingredients has made me more creative in the kitchen. I tend to create more variety in my meals with the capsule kitchen approach.

In the past, almost every dinner included meat, potatoes, and a plain steamed veggie. Boring.

Now that I have a focused capsule of ingredients and have dropped the base carbs (like potato, rice, and pasta), I have gotten more creative with the meat and veggies dishes.

I might roast my veggies, serve a salad, make a slaw, or do up a raw veggie tray to have as a starter.

I try new stir-fry and homemade soup combinations based on the ingredients I have on hand.

I am more likely to marinade meats, decide to BBQ, or use my slow-cooker to keep meals interesting.

Simplified Meal Planning

There is no real need to meal plan or food prep, although you still can if that’s your thing.

If (like me) you’d rather not, you have a variety of ingredients on hand that come together beautifully and a selection of go-to meal types to choose from.

You can decide what you feel like eating in the moment, rather than preparing a dish you choose last week when you were meal planning, but doesn’t appeal to you today.

Gone are the days when you have pasta but no sauce, or have thawed hamburger only to discover you have no buns.

Your mix and match capsule kitchen is always ready to put a meal on the table.

Capsule Kitchen Pros & Cons

Pro – Less Waste (Food & $$$)

When you walk through the grocery store and you are putting everything that looks good into your cart (because you don’t really have a plan) you end up coming home with too much food.

You have ingredients that just don’t work together, or you only use an ingredient for one meal, and food goes to waste.

The capsule kitchen keeps you on track when shopping.

You buy less and you use it up.

With only two in the household, we can’t go through fresh produce quickly enough to buy more than 2-3 types of fresh fruits and veggies at a time.

When I finish up the bag of apples, but still have berries on hand I add “fruit” to my list. If both are gone, I add “fruit x2” to my list.

If I have come home with celery, I know I will use it in stir fry, soup, salads, and as veggie sticks in my lunch.

I will use it up completely before I replace it, and when I do replace it I will pick a different vegetable.

Let’s say peppers are available for a good price. Perhaps that is the what I will replace it with.

I can make a pepper steak stir fry, stuffed peppers, use it in salads, and as veggie sticks in my lunch.

Although I have stuck with the simple capsule kitchen base items, what I am eating is still varied and interesting without all the wasted ingredients.

Pro – More Organized Kitchen

Since moving to a capsule kitchen, I no longer bring home ingredients that are going to get shoved to the back of the fridge/cupboard and stay there.

The refrigerator and cupboards are not crammed full.

It is easy to move things around and find what I am looking for.

I use zones in my small space to stay organized and the capsule kitchen works perfectly with zones. (I will do a future note about using zones to stay organized in small spaces!)

I live in a small space, and it is nice to be able to easily pull out my ingredients for a meal without having to unload and reload a cupboard to get to what I am looking for.

Con – Food that doesn’t fit

The only real challenge I have found with the capsule kitchen is the question of what to do with food that I already had that doesn’t fit well into my capsule kitchen.

I have some foods that are just “hanging out” and don’t seem to be getting used up.

To be fair, some of this has to do with the fact that I am eating differently due to my efforts to reverse my pre-diabetes. In part, however, these are just foods that I don’t reach for anymore.

Cans of soup are a great example.

My capsule kitchen makes homemade soup an easy meal to pull together. My poor cans of processed soup are languishing.

At this point, I am thinking a donation to the food bank may be in order!

The Simple Summary

I struggled with simple eating for a long time. The capsule kitchen has been a game changer for me.

Stocking your kitchen with all the things, crowds your cupboards, makes it hard to know what ingredients you have to prepare meals, and means you are sifting thought a lot of options to try and decide what to put on the table.

Shopping is complicated and meal planning is complicated.

Like many things in life, less (in the kitchen) is more.

We all have go to meal choices that consistently work for us and our lifestyle. These are the foods we prepare most often.

Embrace those go-to choices as your meal types to choose from.

Stock your kitchen with your staple ingredients. Add to that the seasonal or sale items that you find in your grocery store.

Shopping is simple. Meal planning is unnecessary.

I have finally found a way to spend as little time as possible, shopping and preparing meals, while still eating well.

Will you try a capsule kitchen too?