How To Decide What to Cook: How I Planned 2 Months of Dinners in An Hour

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Your use of these links is greatly appreciated!

I love to plan. Planning the right things makes my life so much easier. And that’s exactly why I love it. But the hardest thing for me to plan? How to decide what to cook for dinner every night! That’s why I finally sat down and planned out 2 months of meals in an hour.

Yes, I do have a course on meal planning. And the system I teach in the course is exactly how I easily planned 2 months of meals in an hour …even after slacking off for so long.

In this post, I’ll show you the easy way to decide what to cook by planning 2 months of dinners in an hour —in 4 steps.

01. Make a list of meals

I keep an ongoing list of all the meals we like to eat and the ones I like to make. When it’s time to meal plan, I pull out my list of dinner ideas.

This makes meal planning faster because you’ll never start with a blank slate. Meal planning can feel like sitting down to write an essay without having any idea what to write about. But when there’s a list of ideas handy, the job goes a lot faster.

This was my first step in planning out 2 months of meals in an hour.

02. Make a calendar

Next, I needed a place to write down my meal plan. I created a “Meal Plan” calendar in my Google calendar so that I can look at on-the-go if needed.

Before making any dinner plans, I blocked any dates when we’d be away from home. Obviously, I don’t have to worry about planning for those days!

Once this was set up, I could begin adding my recipes to the calendar with links from my recipe bank.

03. Use a dinner “themes”

Step 3 is the BIG task: I needed to decide what to cook on which days. For this, I used this infographic for dinner theme ideas. If you search on Pinterest, you’ll find a lot of ideas for “dinner theme nights.” I didn’t follow everything exactly on my infographic, but planning a few theme nights speed up the planning process.

In this particular meal planning session, I quickly filled in my Meal Plan calendar on Tuesdays and Fridays with my themes. I was able to plan about 2 ½ months of Tuesdays and Fridays. Since I have a Meal Master List, I simply listed out every meatless meal for Fridays until I got back to the beginning of my meatless list.

04. Plan variety

Now that I eliminated at least 2 days each week, my focus was variety. If our Taco Tuesday included chicken tacos, I planned a different meat for the day before or after. (It gets boring eating one thing, like chicken, all the time.) Or I planned entirely different types of cuisine from one day to the next. If I didn’t have enough variety, I dragged and dropped recipes on my calendar.

Decide what to cook

That’s how I planned 2 months of dinners in an hour in 4 steps: 

1. Make a list of meals
2. Make a calendar
3. Use a dinner “themes”
4. Plan variety

Ready to create your own Meal Master List and get started on your own meal plan? Swipe a copy of my digital Meal Master List with pre-filled meal ideas. Plus, get a 3-part email series with meal planning tips & an exclusive coupon code!