Weekly Meal Planning

[DanicaDoodle]

I am trying to sort out meal times in my house mhy family. Do you have any ideas of themes or kinds of meals I can assign to each day of the week? I know things like Taco Tuesday and Pizza Friday, but I do not know what the other five days would be. I do not want to be eating the same seven dinners every week, so it should be more of categories I can use to plan my meals for each day of the week 

[calmck]

How old are any children. They make a difference to what you serve.

meat or chicken pie, pasta dish, fish dish. Leftovers, toad in the hole, noodles, egg dish, a vegetable only day, cauliflower  cheese, tuna casserole. Endless possibilities

[Buenchico]

I'm guessing that you're in the USA.  This website is UK-based, where 'Taco Tuesday' and 'Pizza Friday' aren't particularly well-known concepts.  For us, 'Fishy Friday' is far more common.  (Fresh fish can be expensive but there are loads of cheap meals that you can make with canned or frozen fish).

More ideas here:
https://permies.com/t/174928/Meatball-Monday-Taco-Tuesday-days

[Smowball]

I tell you what I read somewhere that is a good way of doing it, and my friend does it now - everyone in the house sat down and in middle of table was a pile of blank little bits of plain paper, and pens. Depending on age, each person would write down on each scrap of paper a meal that they liked. You could write as many scraps of paper as you wanted. Then they were all put into a bowl in the middle - as many as you liked. Any duplicates were thrown out. Hopefully there would be a huge bowlful of paper scraps, each with a meal idea on. This whole bowlful were then put into a big jar, and then in future every single week someone would pick out 7 scraps of paper from the jar - that would be that weeks 7 nights of meals. Usually they'd be picked out the day before shopping. And no arguing about whether anyone liked dinner or not because they'd all written down meals that they liked. My friend says that it's working really really well. And when someone comes up with a new meal idea they just write the new one on a piece of paper and add it to the bowl. Then at the end of every week they put the 7 back in the jar, shuffle about and pick another 7 for the following week.

[Old_Geezer]

Various national dishes, obviously Indian or Chinese but there are others. Then there's beefsteak day, pork day, lamb day, chicken day, venison day, etc.. There are stews & soups. Pie day. Burger day. Fasting day. Let's go to a fast food place because they're serving salad at home day.

[Old_Geezer]

The trouble with that Smow, is that another family member could add something you can't stand; so there may be lots of arguing.

[Buenchico]

>>> "Various national dishes"

An excellent starting point, I feel, O_G.

'Taco Tuesday' could be expanded to become 'Tex-Mex Tuesday'.  Other days could see Indian, Chinese, Thai, Jamaican, Cajun and Moroccan dishes, etc included on the menus.  One day could, perhaps, be set aside for foods from the guest nation of the week, such as pierogi or gołąbki from Poland or currywurst from Germany.

[Vagus]

Nope, I've never done weekly meal planning.  We always had a chat each day as to what we'd have that evening, didn't always please everyone but I'm not a cafe and they got used to that.

Now there's only the two of us and he doesn't care what we have which sometimes is good and sometimes not. Most of our meals are about not wasting food.