Use This Plug-and-Play Formula to Figure Out What to Cook for Dinner Every Night

When I first got married, I had no confidence in my ability to cook. My mom was always the one who cooked. Most of my experience was in baking cakes and chocolate chip cookies and not much else. Luckily, when I did start cooking, instinct took over (from a long line of cooks on both sides of my family) and I could turn out a decent meal. 

The hard part?

Figuring out what to cook every single night.

Since I’m all about making all things homemaking easy, you bet I came up with a way to make figuring out what to cook for dinner easier.

I plan an entire month of meals ahead of time in one sitting. And although my Meal Master List prevents me from having to start from scratch every single month I sit down to plan, it’s daunting to sit down to a blank calendar.

One thing I teach my students is not to reinvent the wheel around homemaking routines. Meal planning is no different.

Here’s a plug-and-play formula to come up with what to cook every night of the week.

The Formula

For each day of the week, assign a theme for meals. I like having 3 different themes to choose from so I have more options but I’m not left with too many choices.

Fewer choices makes it more simple.

You’ve probably heard of this before. But starting with a template when you can saves lot of time.

Here are the themes I’ve assigned, but there are hundreds of other dinner theme ideas on Pinterest.

How To Plan

As I meal plan, I’ll move vertically through the calendar instead of horizontally so I only need to focus on one theme.

For example, I’ll plan what to cook on each Sunday of the month. Then I’ll move on to Monday, then Tuesday, and so on.

It’s also worth saying that using the Meal Master List (detailed in this post) makes this formula even easier to use. Instead of starting from scratch every month, you’ll have a list of meals to add to your meal plan.

Your next steps …

Create your own meal plan for the month ahead using the dinner theme ideas to get you started.

Download the digital Meal Master List to make meal planning faster and easier.