A three-kilo head of napa cabbage, split by part and spread across five weeknights.
Napa cabbage at a Korean grocery usually runs two to three kilos a head. Some stores sell halves, but the whole head is noticeably cheaper. The trouble comes after. You bought it meaning to make kimchi, the week fills up, you get one pot of soup out of it, and the rest goes soft in the fridge. The moment you throw it out, the savings are gone.
Korean recipe sites are mostly written for a family of four eating one meal. American meal-prep blogs rarely cook Korean food. Nothing sits in the gap, so someone buying in bulk has no obvious order to follow. That gap is what this plan is for.
Cut a head in half and you can see three different things. The big outer leaves are thick and tough. There is a lot of fibre in them, so they are stringy raw — but simmer them a while and they turn sweet and soft. Soups and hot pots are where those belong.
The middle leaves are crisp but tender enough to eat with barely any cooking, which makes them right for quick salads and stir-fries. And the pale yellow heart at the centre is the sweetest, most delicate part of all: best raw, wrapped around rice or just pulled apart and eaten. Telling those three apart is essentially the whole plan.
The one thing that matters is breaking it down before it goes in the fridge. Shoved in whole it takes up a shelf, and you can't see how much you've used, so it gets forgotten. Pull off a few outer leaves and bag them separately, then cut the rest lengthwise into two or three pieces.
Wash it only when you're about to cook. Cabbage left damp goes soft far faster. Wrap the cut faces in a paper towel so they don't dry out, bag it, and a week is comfortable. Do that much and you'll actually reach for it on a weeknight instead of ordering something.
What needs to be fresh comes early; what needs long cooking comes late. Move the days around if your week demands it, but keep the order.
The night you buy it. Get the raw dish out of the way while the cabbage is at its crispest. Use the middle leaves.
See recipe→Now the tough outer leaves you set aside. Long simmering breaks down the stringy fibre and pulls sweetness into the broth.
See recipe→The night with the least effort in it. Middle leaves and eggs, done in about ten minutes.
See recipe→This one wraps whole leaves, so pick the ones that haven't torn. Save it for an evening with a little more time.
See recipe→Clearing-out night. Every awkward torn piece goes in. All you need on hand is a bag of frozen dumplings.
See recipe→Five days on cabbage alone isn't realistic. A few things need to be in the kitchen already if you want to avoid a second shopping trip. Doenjang, gochugaru, and minced garlic turn up in four of the five dishes. Eggs, tofu, and green onions get used nearly every night.
A bag of dumplings in the freezer makes the last day much easier. Dried anchovies or kelp will change the broth for the better, but the plan works without them — the point is never to send you back out mid-week for one missing item.
This is what the five dishes need. Most of it is bought once and used all week.
Dried anchovies and kelp will change the broth for the better, but the plan works without them. It is built so that nothing missing sends you back out mid-week.
The gram amounts in the linked recipes come straight from the public dataset, where they function as reference values for measuring nutrition. Fifty grams of napa cabbage is a leaf or two in practice, which will not make a meal on its own.
So what this plan fixes is the order, not the weights. Keep to which part gets used when and scale the amounts to however many people are eating. Cabbage collapses dramatically as it cooks, so use more than looks reasonable.
Often the heart survives all five days. It's the tenderest part and doesn't need cooking at all. Pull the leaves off to wrap rice in, or slice them thin and dress them with nothing more than sesame oil and salt.
If even that feels like a chore, slice it and freeze it. Frozen and thawed cabbage loses its crunch and can't go back to raw dishes, but it's perfectly good in soup or dumpling filling. It's already wilted, which makes the prep easier.