About

I can’t tell you the amount of times we would do a huge shop, come home and still not know what to cook for dinner!”

Theo Michaels
Theo Michaels

After Masterchef in 2014, I quit my city job to follow a life in food – many years on I’m an Executive chef, seven published cookbooks and resident chef on Channel 4’s Steph’s Packed Lunch.

During lockdown me and my family were one of the first (I think maybe the first?) to host a live cookalong for kids; we did 36 shows in total – that’s 3 a week for 12 weeks! Me and the kids! It was mayhem! Anna had the right idea of staying behind the camera instead! 🙂

As mentioned on the front page I cook and create all the recipes for FiveDinners and really hope you like them and they make your dinnertimes as seamless and stressfree as possible!

Anna Michaels

“I’m Anna, a comms professional, mum to three kids and Theo’s better half 🙂

My background includes 20 years working in communications and campaigns, specifically within the charity sector. I look after all our social media for FiveDinners (unless you spot a bad joke then Theo has probably snuck in a post) :)”

Unlike Theo, I am rubbish at cooking but seem to be the one who does it the most in our house! I’m basically our unofficial test pilot for all the recipes. If I can make them – I know you can!


FiveDinners is proud to support The Sick Children’s Trust – read more


Why FiveDinners?

As a regular family, we wanted to take the stress out of deciding what to cook each night. We wanted to spend less money on food shopping, reduce our food waste and generally just make life a little easier. We started meal planning and couldn’t believe the results..


We started meal planning at home…

Each week we would create five really easy, well balanced recipes that in some way ‘connected’. What I mean by ‘connected’ is that if we had something with rice on Monday, we’d make extra so we could make stir fried rice on Tuesday – making dinnertimes faster and wasting less food.


What happened?

Literally overnight our family mid-week meals became easy.. We didn’t have the stress of deciding what to cook anymore – that bit was done! We stopped nipping to the shops mid-week because we had bought everything needed for our five dinners in one go – which also meant we managed to suddenly cut our food bill in half and were wasting less food each week!

I won’t say it was life changing…but…a pretty good improvement!


FiveDinners was born…

We quickly realised that for all the millions of recipes on the internet no one actually offered what we wanted and ultimately created; a proper weekly meal plan with easy, well balanced recipes that the kids will actually eat WITH a single shopping list with all the ingredients in one place for the whole week.

FiveDinners does that.


After several months of creating meal plans – we were amazed at how well it worked, but there was a catch…

Creating a weekly meal plan, a proper one, with all the ingredients on one shopping list was hard work. But the benefits were worth it; dinnertimes were just so much calmer, we knew what we were cooking, had all the ingredients, it was a breeze and for us – we were saving a bunch of cash, like a lot!

After speaking with friends and family we realised that the concept of a meal plan was something everyone loved but always hit the same obstacles:

  • can’t decide what to cook everynight
  • don’t have time to plan in advance
  • too much choice from the millions of recipes online
  • still had to wade through loads of ingredients lists trying to figure out what to buy

FiveDinners fixes all that.

Five recipes, one shopping list – time to make life easy again!

Members can now saunter down to the shops (or shop online) and get everything in one go, saving money and headaches!

You can change the serving sizes to suit your family (the shopping list automatically changes) or tweak recipes for a more flexitarian approach. We can’t wait for you to start enjoying FiveDinners meal planning!