Tasty tasty yum yum tasty

an update on my quarterly meal planning experiment

Someone (maybe liesl?) asked for an update on the quarterly meal planning approach I started this year. I’m in Q2 now and overall I’d say it’s been pretty successful and definitely lowered the stress of meal planning for us.

Recap: Starting with Q1 2025, I planned 2 weeks of dinners and put them on our Google calendar, repeating for the entire quarter (Jan-Mar). This meant that when I did our weekly online grocery shopping, I already knew what we were eating, eliminating that planning step.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Our Q1 list of dinners:

• Taco night with premade carnitas or ground beef + fruit

• NYT Tomato ricotta pasta + bag Caesar salad

• NYT Korean meatballs + kimchi + canned pineapple

• NYT Sheet Pan Fish Tikka Masala + spinach + rice

• Cream cheese, artichoke, spinach quesadillas + fruit

• Chicken & paneer curry (Maya Kaimal simmer sauce) + rice or naan

• Steak and black bean chili + tortilla chips

• Frozen dumplings, pierogi, or samosas + frozen veggies

• 2 nights everyone scrounges - cereal, frozen stuff, leftovers

• 3 nights eating out - 1 sushi + 2 family choice

So this worked because we ended up “cheating” a little. We started a home construction project to expand our powder room (kitchen-adjacent), that quickly turned into “replace the flooring in the powder room, dining room and entryway” once the contractors realized there was no subfloor or concrete slab foundation, only dirt, a mysterious gross puddle, loose electrical wires and rotting posts (yay old houses!). So for about 3-4 weeks we had no dining room, and could only access the kitchen from the outside door. Cooking was too challenging with all the dust and construction so we skipped it for about a month and ate out or heated up frozen things.

There was one meal I never made because we were not ever home on a Saturday night (or the kitchen was unavailable) so I punted it to Q2. Each week I looked over our schedule to see when the kids had other activities and we needed to grab fast food or had other plans to eat out with family or friends. So I’d remove the “planned” meal from that day, and we typically didn’t have any last-minute changes.

The verdict? No one complained about “having xyz AGAIN”. It wasn’t frequent enough to trigger that. One kid would eat chicken/paneer curry daily (and has- I taught them how to make it themself last week and they ate all of it over the week!). I also bought bibigo plain rice bowls at Costco (cooked rice, microwave) and those are great for school lunches or if only one person wants rice.

The fish tikka masala wasn’t a hit so we substituted shrimp and that was better received, but probably not a long-term keeper. The meatballs were “only ok” so I will not keep them on the list to repeat later. I have a few other meatball recipes to rotate in.

I also got better at cooking these specific items more quickly so it felt less onerous. I enjoy “project cooking” and exploring new recipes occasionally but not 5x a week, even with a lot of free time.

With kids in school and theater/choir, we had several days where the planned meal wasn’t possible, and this built in variety naturally. Either they grabbed something quickly or we got fast food. If I wasn’t expecting it, I’d swap the meal I planned to cook for a later “eating out” day so we weren’t eating out 3+ times in a week but that was rare. The biggest wrinkle was the unexpected construction on the house.

I planned a new set of meals for Q2 and so far it’s going well, though I’ve made some mistakes I’ll write about. But I feel like I’ve solved the problem - it was the weekly decision-making I find stressful, not the actual cooking!