Everything runs right on time

I have struggled with cooking dinner for as long as I’ve had kids. Pre-kids, TJ and I would usually sort out our own food at home and sometimes sit down together to eat it, or we’d go out.

But with kids it all changed. I knew I wanted to (eventually) have “family dinners” most nights, and of course babies and toddlers can’t really feed themselves so I had to create a better plan.

I muddled along for years not understanding why it was so damn difficult. Part of it is that kids can be brutal and cooking a meal and having it critiqued or picked at is ROUGH. And my kids were mostly not RUDE about it, either, but you can tell when someone isn’t enjoying their food.

My friend N nailed it one day when we were having coffee - she said growing up she had almost the same dinner daily - daal, chapati, and some kind of vegetable. Sure, there were variations in that but the basic idea was always the same. I grew up with slightly more variety, but often dinner was rice, rasam or yogurt, and a stir-fried or curry vegetable dish. And it was fine (though I’m sure I grumbled about it because kids.)

Photo by sorin popa on Unsplash

But we are now trying to cook all the cuisines - let’s try Korean! Japanese! Italian! Ethiopian! Thai! It’s too much. I never get good at any one dish because I make it once and then we might only have it again if everyone LOVED it, and probably not more than twice a year.

I realized early on I needed to tell my kids that not every meal needs to be your favorite, or even something you LIKE. It just needs to be edible and somewhat nutritious. I still repeat that occasionally.

But the meal planning-grocery shopping-cooking efficiency eluded me. I kept trying to find solutions. We tried meal prep kits - Hungryroot (vegan, no one else liked it) and Hello Fresh and Sunbasket (yummy but gets boring). For a while I did “theme nights” like Breakfast for Dinner, Taco Tuesday, and Pasta Night and while those gave me a framework for planning, it still felt like work to come up with the meals for those categories. I recently read an article that it’s an unsolvable problem.

I refuse to believe that. We’re not going to become Soylent bros, but I’ve hit on a strategy I’ve been meaning to put in place for YEARS. I always get through the first step - list meals we actually all like - but then fail to proceed.

I finally used all this free time to implement “the system”. I mapped out 2 weeks of dinner, incorporating some “scrounge for yourself” and “we eat out” days to be realistic. Ya girl is NOT going to cook 14 dinners in a row. There’s one night that T has a very early choir practice before C is even home from afterschool play rehearsal. This is not a family dinner night - it’s “heat up a frozen burrito and grab a fruit”. The nights I cook are planned from my family-crowdsourced list of what we like.

When planning I added a couple of new items from NYT Cooking so we can find new family favorites for the main list. I’ve committed to make these new meals at least twice to ensure we really don’t love it, adjusting either the protein used (we are not fans of mahi mahi) or some element of the spices (too spicy, too bland, etc). For example, this week I’m substituting shrimp for the whitefish in this Sheet Pan Tikka Masala. It was an excellent marinade, but we didn’t love the texture of the fish.

And then the kicker, incorporating the conversation I had with N - I *repeat* those two weeks of meals for the entire quarter. I do my personal planning quarterly so this is a good cadence. If young Indian-American kids can eat essentially the same food nightly, my kids can live with eating NYT ricotta tomato pasta 6 times in 3 months.

When I did my Q1 planning, I added these meals to our Google Calendar on a 2 week repeat, ending March 31. Each week when I sit down to plan meals and order groceries, I look at the calendar for the meal on deck and figure out if we have to skip it due to other plans. *But it’s already there and planned!*

I then order the groceries online for these meals, and I’ve already noticed it’s quicker because I’ve made these a few times and know quickly what I need, instead of having to scan the recipe carefully for each ingredient. Occasionally I still have items left from the last time we made it and they’re still good to use! Kids eat the leftovers for breakfast or lunch because they’re usually something they actively like. It’s been working surprisingly well.

Life also intervenes to save us from the monotony of repetition. One night I was supposed to cook, TJ decided to make homemade pizza. I’ll take that instead! Sometimes we have school events and we’ll have to grab takeout or stop at a restaurant afterwards.

It’s not really less work cooking but it really cuts down on my mental load of planning and shopping each week. Since I have a solid plan, I know I have the ingredients on hand so I can just start cooking at 5pm without a last minute dash to Safeway or giving up and going to Taco Bell. And because they are mostly things I know everyone likes, dinners are a lot more pleasant, and sometimes I even get the satisfaction of seeing our pickiest family member go back for seconds!

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

At the end of March, I will swap out most of the home-cooked meals in the 2 week plan for a few new recipes and other favorites that I didn’t get to in the first rotation. At that point I’ll decide whether we need a wholesale swap of all meals or if there are any we’re happy to keep eating.

I won’t declare victory yet until the end of Q1, but it feels really good now!