I am the main cook for my family, and I am pretty bad at it. It’s not the cooking part that’s hard, but just deciding what I’m going to cook.
Sometimes I grab a cookbook, roll a random number on some dice, and cook whatever is on that page. Sometimes I buy something on sale, so I have to cook that. I have heard some people designate days - Monday is pasta, Tuesday is chicken, etc.
What’s your strategy?
Right now it’s easy - I’m doing a low carb/ low fat diet, so we have the same thing most nights - I take a bag of chicken out of the freezer in the morning, dump a bottle of marinade in it, and leave it in the sink (along with a bag of frozen veg med). When he gets home, my husband puts things into casserole dishes and bakes it up, just in time for me to get home. Maybe not exciting, but tasty enough, and I’ve lost almost 15 pounds!
There are certain “Family Favorites” that show up every so often. Whether or not to cook one of them depends on when we last had it. It can be complicated to make (Beef Strogonoff, Lasagne) or simple (Spaghetti, Bacon and Eggs, Chicken Cutlets, Chicken Fingers). Additionally there are things the kids won’t eat that we have when there’s just the two of us (Almost anything Chinese or Stir Fried).
It also depends on who’s home to get dinner started, whether I feel like barbecuing, etc.
In any event, there has to be a consensus, and that means either planning ahead on the weekend, or taking a vote on that particular night.
I have an outline of what I want to eat every week and usually start my planning around that.
Fish 1-2x
Chicken - 3-4x
Beef/Lamb/Pork - 1-3x
with at least 50% of the meal being vegetables, ideally those that are in season.
I plan my meals a week in advance so I can buy ingredients, and if a meal uses a perishable non-staple I’ll make meals that use them up. I also plan meals depending on how busy I’m going to be - if I’m going to be out all day I’ll decide on something quick, or make a meal earlier in the week that will provide leftovers. If I anticipate being sedentary one day I’ll plan something lower in calories, and if I know I’m going to be exercising hard another day I’ll have something carbier.
I have my tried and true recipes as well as hundreds of bookmarked internet recipes that look good. Once I know the basic requirements of the upcoming week I’ll have a look through my folder, various internet recipe sites and my favourite food blogs to find something that suits.
Typing all that out kind of makes it seem laborious, but I love looking at food blogs and recipe sites in my down time, and when I find something that appeals I’ll bookmark it. And figuring out time restrictions and calorie/macrunutrient requirements for any given day is pretty simple as well. It’s important to me to have a variety of tasty, nutritional meals, and it’s much easier to plan everything out beforehand.
Mostly it’s what do I have in the fridge/freezer that
a) I feel like having/have time to make
b) haven’t had in awhile
It’s very dynamic, I don’t do much planning beyond what looks good and is on sale and try to plan around that. I browse cookbooks, recipe blogs and have a pretty regular rotation of things (stuff like chicken casserole, stews, chili etc tend to be made on the weekends because they take more time either cooking and/or prep and also are more likely to be made when it’s cool outside… salads, crock pot recipes tend to be made more in the summer when it’s too hot to do much cooking).
If I do meal planning though, I look through the cookbooks and flyers and gather the items for specific meals but I almost never plan down to the day what I will make. If I have the things for stir fry, spaghetti, a salmon dinner and a chicken dinner I never know which day I will make them beyond sometime in the coming week or so. Sometimes I’ll buy items not knowing exactly what I’ll make but I’ll come across a recipe and try it out since I happen to have the items around.
I’m somewhat surprised to see In Winnipeg saying Beef stroganoff is complicated to make, that’s one of my go-to recipes for when I want something quick and easy to do because I don’t feel like cooking or want something NOW (and it’s not the hamburger helper stuff either!).
The weekend items also tend to be larger batches so I can freeze up for when I really don’t feel like cooking. I can pull out a batch of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread and have ready supper in the time it would take for a pizza to get here.
I have a few favorites that I keep ingredients on hand for at all times, but what I love doing is staring into the cupboard, fridge or freezer, digging around and pulling out a few things that need to get eaten, then entering those ingredients into Google to get a base starting point for a recipe.
Last week I had 2 1/2 lbs of ground beef in the freezer that I needed to use and an onion on the verge. Another week and I would have tossed it. I sautéed the onion, then browned the ground beef and drained it well, mixed the onion back in and then halved it so I could make 2 dinners.
Dinner one: I grabbed 2 cans of cream of mushroom soup, a can of French onion soup out of the cupboard and mixed them all together in a pan. Then I added some garlic powder, a touch of cayenne pepper and some fresh ground black pepper, and heated it through. Then I added back one half of the ground beef mixture and a dollop of sour cream and served it over hot buttered egg noodles. It’s not a proper Stroganoff, but it was really good.
Dinner two: I keep several packages of heat and eat Madras Lentils from Costco on hand at all times. It tastes just like chili, but it’s vegetarian. I’m not vegetarian, but it tastes so good and it’s ready to eat in 90 seconds, so it’s easy to take to work. So I take 2 packs of the lentils and mix them with the other half of the beef mixture, and serve this over rice with cornbread muffins.
Snack one: Take remaining beef and lentil mixture and make nachos. YUM!
Dinner is easy.
If I bought fish today, then I eat fish.
Else if I removed a boneless chicken breast, then I eat chicken.
Else, I eat tofu.
It’s starting to get a little boring but it’s cheap and delicious so I can live with it.
It just being me at my house, it’s usually not too hard.
I make a list before grocery shopping, usually with one night of serious cooking / company food (I usually entertain about that often), the general, need this stuff for work lunches / breakfast / staples items and hit the farmer’s market and grocery.
I usually eat out 1-2 evenings a week, I’m at work for three, entertain one night and have whatever (bagged salad, cereal, leftovers, something easy from the freezer) the remaining evenings. Not too difficult.
When I had a family at home, menus were planned for every evening, with the input of the chefs (my ex cooked 1-2 nights a week and the kids each had one night) and the considerations of what we had in the freezer and coming off fresh from the garden. Grocery shopping covered the rest. What kinds of bread I baked on Saturdays also influenced the menus.
What was on the menu also depended upon schedules for the week, so some nights were planned leftovers, some nights were beginner-type stuff (kids cooking) and some nights were serious cooking.
First I consider what’s in the fridge, and if it needs to be used up soon. Then, if there’s nothing in the fridge, I consider what’s in the freezer. I try to rotate my frozen stuff. I also take into account what we’ve had lately. We have favorites, definitely. Also, I try not to turn the oven on unless the weather is cold enough that we need the heat in the house…why turn on the oven when it’s 105 outside, and I’ll just have to run the AC to get the oven heat out of the house too?
My husband will almost always welcome a spaghetti dinner, meatloaf, or pork chops. And I like ham’n’beans and corned beef and cabbage and pork chops. Our daughter loves various chicken and poultry and fish dishes, so generally that’s what I fix when she’s visiting. Usually my husband and I discuss the week’s meals before grocery shopping.
Some days I/we really want to eat something in particular.
For exemple two days ago I really wanted to eat rice, and I knew we had a bowl of fava beans in the fridge that needed to be taken care of, so I googled " recipe fava beans rice" to see what I could add, and made a nice dish with onions, garlic, thym, whole grain mustard and whole cream.
Yesterday he wanted to eat chapatis so I made a batch of them that we ate plain or with some cheese stuffing.
Most days, we have a look at the garden and see what’s available. Today we’ll probably make for dinner some kind of lasagna with the ripe zucchini and white goosefoot and bistort leaves, and I guess at lunch we’ll ate the remaining of the chapatis.
Some days when we’re feeling lazy we just whip up some noodles or semoule with milk and sugar. Normally we also have a wide array of chinese noodles, to stir fry with various green leaves and sun flower seeds, for those lazy moments, but we ran out of those recently.
I plan my meals at the same time that I write out my shopping list for the week. I start with what’s currently in the house and plans meals around those things, then I come up with as many extra meals as needed. We try to eat red meat twice a week, fish and chicken for other meals. I’ll often ask my husband if he has any special requests.
The meal planning isn’t so much “Monday we’ll have this, Tuesday we’ll have that,” it’s more a list of seven meals and we decide what order to eat them in according to what we feel like. Typically meals with short-life foods will be eaten earlier in the week, to make sure everything is still nice and fresh.
I’m the main cook for our family and find that planning meals for a week at a time is a lifesaver for me. I have some rules:[ul][li]fish at least once, and preferrably twice, a week[]beef no more than once a week[]avoid repeats on successive nightsevery other Friday is pizza night, or the kids would riot :p[/ul]I’ve made up a list of some meals that pretty much everybody likes, and I use that for inspiration, though not all meals come off that list - I try new things, and I probably don’t update the list nearly as often as I should.[/li]
When I know that tonight (for example) we’re going to have teriyaki chicken with vegetables and rice, it’s easy for me to stick to it, and I avoid the “what on earth can I make for dinner tonight?!?” panic I used to get pretty much every day.
I apply the method I experienced growing up: on the menu every night is a dish my mother liked to call “‘What We’ve Got’ with a side of ‘Just Eat It.’”
My husband has band practice two nights a week so we eat very late, so those nights we don’t eat anything heavy. Tuesday I am out as well, so on Monday I usually make a casserole that he can put in the oven when he gets home and it’s ready when I get home. I check the grocery ads to see what’s on sale, and beg him to give me ideas but he’s like the Sphinx. Every once in a while he’ll venture “Maybe you could make something like chicken paprikash except put little meatballs in it and serve it over elbow macaroni.” :dubious: What the hell, I’ll give it a try. If he doesn’t like it, it was his idea. 
We eat tortillas with grilled steak a lot, and turkey burgers with brown rice.
When we do our grocery shopping, we decide what specific dishes we are going to make that week, buy everything for those dishes, and throughout the week make them based on what we’re in the mood for or what has ingredients that need to be used up first. Deciding what to make for the week is tough sometimes. There are blogs we regularly read that will give us inspiration, or recipe websites where we can search for chicken and get a ton of recipes using chicken. Usually its us writing down whatever we’re in the mood for and can afford, especially if it’ll give us lots of leftovers.
Once a week, I bring home a fifty-pound bag of Purina Bachelor Chow. If you pour beer into it, it makes its own gravy.
In our house, we generally end up in some sort of summit each afternoon.
Suburban Plankton, Ledzepkid(12) and I end up discussing what we want to eat, whether or not we have the ingredients, what ingredients we do have, and who is going to cook.
Sunday evening the kid wanted spaghetti, we had what was needed already, so he cooked. Wednesday, SP wanted baked rigatoni, he picked up what we needed (sausage) on the way home from work and I cooked. No real rhyme or reason to it.
I peruse the menu. 
We cook for each other on Monday nights. Other weeknights its every person for themselves. Weekends we usually eat out. For the Monday night meals, I usually have a huge backlog of “things I’d like to try making” .
I do almost all cooking on the weekends, then we eat off that during the week. Typically I will make one large meat dish and one large vegetarian dish so we can alternate.
In terms of what to make, I have a backlog of recipes I’d like to try, plus I’m on a clean out the pantry & freezer kick. I keep a list of stuff that needs to be used up (sauces, spices, frozen meats & veg) and try to plan meals using one or more of those items. I make it into a game: what can I fix that will use the maximum amount of stuff on the list, that will also taste good? Also, each of us has dishes that we particularly enjoy so those get repeated in the rotation every few months.
This is what I do. Basically I say to myself, “We need a chicken dish. Hmm, whole chickens are on sale. I can boil up a chicken on Sunday, pick the meat and have two meals. Chicken and rice casserole this week, then.” And I’ll have another meal for next week, to make King Ranch Chicken, or soup, or whatever.
I plan six meals, sometimes seven. I have enough on hand that I an change out a menu if I don’t feel like having something I had planned. We get a to-go meal on Friday nights for after Happy Hour. I also make crock pot stuff on some Fridays.