Planning specific recipes makes you hostage to prices. If chicken isn't on sale, you overpay. But shopping sales leads to random ingredients you don't know how to use.
Use Front Page Rule to identify sale "anchors," then plug them into your Template Cooking frameworks.
The workflow:
- Check front page of store flyer for loss leaders
- Identify cheap protein + cheap vegetable
- These become your “anchors” for the week
- Plug them into your existing templates (Stir Fry, Sheet Pan, Bowl)
The key: Only buy sale items that fit your existing frameworks. Skip artichokes if you don’t have an artichoke framework.
North: Where this comes from
- Loss Leader Strategy (retail pricing tactics)
- Template Cooking (flexible frameworks)
South: Where this leads
- Opportunity Buy (bulk buying on deep sales)
- Freezer as Reserve (locking in sale prices)