You all amaze me and I have no idea what I’m doing wrong! Maybe I’m going about it the wrong way?

A bit of background, I can cook just about anything, I really love cooking and I’ve been loving it for as long as I remember so I have a lot of recipes I am confident in and acquired many skills. Putting that practice into meal prep and I’m useless.

Where do I start with picking recipes that compliment each other? I’m just wanting recipes that share common ingredients but taste different enough to not be boring. Every post or place I read just suggest what seems like a random assortment of tasty sounding recipes but when adding to my grocery list my wallet starts screaming.

Is there an app, program or something you guys use to help you manage this?
How do people do such large meal preps of what looks like 4-6 meals for such low budgets?

Up until now I use Paprika. It’s great, I store all my recipes there, my shopping list, etc. but it’s still incredibly manual of a process where I’m having to manually pick recipes that I think work together then I end up with random amounts of say cream that goes mouldy by the time I get a chance to use it up!