Not sure what to cook tonight?
This is one of the biggest complaints amongst my clients and my friends. They do not know what to cook or are tired of cooking the same 3 meals over and over again. And since the pandemic started almost a year ago, we have all been cooking so many more meals at home than ever before. Not only are we cooking dinner almost every night, some of us are cooking breakfast and lunch for our families too!
When I ask my kids or my husband for an idea for dinner, I get the same response “I don’t know”. Well, I DON’T KNOW EITHER!!! I got so tired of deciding what I was going to cook on the fly and being stressed about it, I decided to get organized and create a monthly dinner plan.
I now have a dinner menu for a whole month and here is how I did it:
Step 1: Sit down with your kids and brainstorm with them, listing out all of their favorite meals (this way you know they’ll like it and only have to cook one meal for the whole family - you are not a short order cook!)
Step 2: List out any other meals that are your standard go-to meals
Step 3: List what type of meat or vegetable you are going to cook each day of the week. For example, Mondays - vegetarian, Tuesdays - fish, Wednesdays - chicken, Thursdays - beef, Fridays - take out (woo hoo!), Saturdays - pork, Sundays - repeat one
Step 4: Then if you want to get fancy, you could also list out a different type of cuisine each day. For example: Mondays - American, Tuesdays - Mexican, Wednesday - Indian, Thursdays - Thai. This gives you the variety in the type of cuisine as well as the type of meat.
Step 5: Repeat for 4 weeks
Step 6: Plug in the meals from your brainstorm session.
Step 7: If you don’t have enough meals to fill a whole month, then leaf through some of your old cook books and fill the empty spots
Step 8: Head to the grocery store (or order online) and buy all your ingredients for the whole week - you only have to go to the store once!
As my kids get older I find that I have many more dishes to choose from, so I even keep a few meals that I didn’t put in the menu so I can swap out some of the meals.
As I write this I’m having flash backs of a monthly menu pasted in my kitchen cupboard growing up - I just realized that my mom used to do this too! Thanks for the tip mom!