How many times do you forget to plan dinner and end up having dinner delivered? What would your dream dinners be like if you could plan what you wanted? Do you want prepared dinners or do you want to cook your own? Do you want dinner delivery or gourmet dinner you have cooked yourself? We all know the way to have a good family is family dinners. Often the thing missing is the planning. Here’s a method I use to plan dinners for the week.

Give yourself an hour or two on Sunday afternoon to sit down with paper and pen to plan for the week.

Plan one meal for each day. You can do a theme if you like, chicken on Monday, Chinese on Tuesday, Mexican on Wednesday, vegetarian on Thursday etc. Or just choose 7 meals that your family would like to eat.

Convert your 7 meals to one shopping list; you will need to go shopping on Monday. Or you can use delivery from your local grocery store. Place your order online on Sunday for delivery on Monday. Remember that you are buying once a week, every Monday. So don’t plan fresh fish for 7 days later or it won’t be so fresh. Maybe plan a meal that requires frozen ingredients for Saturday and Sunday.

If you have a large family you can do two shopping trips in the week. Create two shopping lists on Sunday, then go shopping (or have another delivery) on Monday and Friday.

Each day in the morning check the list of what is for dinner and take out of the freezer anything that needs to be defrosted for that evening, or maybe remove it from the freezer the night before.

Then you have your meals planned for the week and the ingredients to match in the house and ready to cook.

If you have older children in the house or a husband who likes to cook, give everyone one day each that is their day to cook. Mom cooks Monday, dad cooks Tuesday, first child cooks Wednesday etc. Then each person plans one meal each week and submits their menu plan to you on Sunday. You put everyone’s dinner plans together to make your shopping lists.

One more thing...
I have 4 children and for a long time they had a day each to cook dinner, Monday through Thursday. Dad cooked Friday, I cooked Saturday and we ate out on Sundays. Of course the children needed help planning and executing their meals, but that’s how they learned to cook.




The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time