The Dinner Plan That’s Simplifying My Life
Over the summer, Bart and I decided to change up our dinner plans.
I’ve always just made up a weekly menu plan and made something different most nights for dinner.
The idea of a meal rotation hadn’t really appealed to either Bart or me, since we didn’t want to just keep eating the same thing week after week or month after month.
But then, in a casual chat about our summer dinner plans, one of us suggested that we do a full two week meal plan and then repeat it 2-3 times (for a total of 6-8 weeks).
There were some major benefits to this scheme:
- You don’t have to keep making a new meal plan every week – instead you’re making a new meal plan every 6-8 weeks.
- Repeating the same meals means you get faster and better at making them.
- When you’re only doing 6-8 weeks, you can customize to the season very easily so you’re taking advantage of what’s in season, growing in the garden, and on sale in the grocery store.
- There is less waste because you’ll have a chance to use up unused ingredients in another two weeks.
We just finished our first rotation of this dinner plan and it was SO GREAT.
Putting in my grocery order every week was a breeze and knowing I had the full week of both main dishes and side dishes planned out made every night much less stressful.
Here’s what was on our most recent dinner rotation:
- Hot Honey Salmon with roasted Brussel sprouts and dinner rolls
- Blueberry Chicken Salad with watermelon and sautéed zucchini
- Creamy Corn Chowder with zucchini muffins and grapes
- Blue Cheese and Bacon Pitas with pineapple, chips, and roasted broccoli
- Chicken Tacos with roasted beets and grapes
- Peach and Basil Chicken with quinoa and cherries
- Broccoli Cheese Quiche with spinach salad and banana muffins
- Shepherd’s Pie with a green salad and golden melon
- Fish Taco Bowls with strawberries and tortilla chips
- Chicken Stroganoff with cauliflower puree and peaches
We only have five meals a week on here because on Friday we always do pizza and on Saturday Bart and I go out or we do takeout as a family.
And of course, there were nights where we just had leftovers or pancakes instead, or we went to my in-laws house for dinner or something else came up.
And now I’m all excited about putting together my next set of dinner plans with early fall recipes!
Any questions about this? Happy to answer!
If you liked this post about our dinner plans, you might like these posts too:
- 11 tips for simplifying dinner time
- Dinner recipes our whole family loves
- My favorite meals for feeding a group
Photos by Heather Mildenstein
The link for peach and basil chicken brings me to the chicken tacos. Which DO look amazing!
Oh, thank you! Fixed now.
That’s so funny because I just started a system where I plan 4 weeks of meals and then plan to repeat them 2 times for a total of 3 months (instead of new weekly plans). So essentially 1 meal plan for a full season (spring/summer/fall/winter) for all those reasons of eating seasonally, etc. It was a longer upfront time investment but I made a spreadsheet with them all listed out and now I can use the same recipes each season with a few tweaks if we are tired of something. In my spreadsheet I added a column of the unique ingredients needed for each recipe so it’ll make the grocery ordering super fast as well. It took me about 2 hours to make my first one because I was figuring all this out. But I expect it’ll go much faster in the future.
This is such a great idea! A couple of years ago, you mentioned that your mom rotated through 30 recipes and I loved that idea so much, I started trying to collect my 30 recipes. We wound up starting a family cookbook that now has about 70 recipes and we use our family cookbook for our weekly meal planning, occasionally throwing in a new recipe when we have time to try something new. Also, we just added your buttermilk pancake recipe to our book…holy cow, those pancakes are amazing!!
I just did this! I picked 18 favorite recipes (with leftovers and pizza night, we only need 3 a week) for a total of 6 weeks of meals. One meal a week is seasonal and I’ll swap it out in the fall. I went one step further and created a grocery list for every two weeks to make adding things to the list super easy. As an engineer, of course everything is color coded in Excel ;o) Glad you found something that works!
This looks way too fun. I guess I know what I’m doing for September-November meal planning. This will make it way easier once baby #3 shows up in December too!
This is genius! Thank you! I’m going to put this into practice. I like to love hard on my favorites, but then I get burnt out. Of course it will help to change it up only every other month or so.
Roasted beets? Im curious. I love beets. How do you roast them?
Slice them about 1/4-1/2 inch thick, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, then cook at 400 degrees until tender.
I love this! When you have your fall meal plan in place please post it!
Right here: https://everyday-reading.com/fall-dinner-ideas/
I’m curious- which recipes come from the Two Peas in their Pods cookbook?! I’d like to order that cookbook