Meal prep is one of the things I am determined to streamline this year.
Why? Because I literally spend hours each week planning what to cook, making a grocery list, ordering and picking up groceries, and actually cooking the food.
I want us to have healthy, yummy food, but there has to be an easier and faster way to accomplish that, right?
That’s why I decided to experiment with a few meal planning techniques at the beginning of the year.
First on the list was using theme dinners. I’m betting you have heard of this, or at least seen it on Pinterest. But contrary to what many of the pins show you, there are multiple ways to do theme dinners.
4 Ways to Have Theme Dinners
1. Ethnic Theme Dinners
This is the theme dinners that you have probably seen a lot online. You pick your favorite types of cuisine- Italian, Mexican, Chinese, American, Thai, Greek– and have a dish each night that falls under each category.
My only complaint with this method is that I have a ton of Italian, Mexican, and American dishes that we love to choose from, but only a couple for the other types. So this theme didn’t work well for us.
But if this theme does appeal to you, this meals list from Just Sweet and Simple will give you some great ideas.
2. Ingredient Theme Dinners
Here’s one you may never have heard of. Choose ingredients that your family likes and plan meals around that. Here are a few ideas: chicken, rice, potatoes, beef, or eggs. Having a night themed around using ingredients in your pantry or fridge is also an idea.
This theme works in a couple of situations- if your family loves anything you make that includes a particular ingredient, or if you have a stockpile of an ingredient that you need to use up.
3. Cooking Technique Theme Dinners
How about planning meals according to how you will cook the food? There are tons of options for this one: slow cooker, grill, Instant Pot, air fryer, freezer meals, sheet pan meals, and one-pot dishes. Using this theme should be one of the quickest ways you can regularly get food on the table.
4. Favorite Foods Theme Dinners
Choose foods that your family loves. For us that would be things like pizza, burgers, breakfast food, quesadillas, pasta, charcuterie boards, and casseroles.
Then fill in each category with specific meals. For example, even with a category like pizza, there is pepperoni pizza, Greek pizza, taco pizza, ham and pineapple, and BBQ pizza. (And yes, I’ve made all those different kinds of pizzas.)
You could use that same technique for each category of food.
Meal Planning Blueprints compiled this epic chart of 42 theme night ideas that is definitely worth checking out. With a resource like this, you should never run out of theme ideas to make meal planning easier.
My Experiment with Theme Dinners
I decided to try theme dinners myself to see if it really made meal planning easier, and these are the themes I chose:
- Mexican
- Asian
- Italian
- Crockpot
- American
- Meatless
- Breakfast
Rules I followed:
- I planned a new meal every other night, since we like leftovers, and I repeated the themes until I filled up the whole month.
- I only chose recipes that we had tried before and liked to cut down on my work.
- I took it a step further by listing sides that would go with each entree.
- During the second week, I created a list of breakfasts, lunches and snacks to rotate, so I barely had to think when I made my grocery list each week.
The Results
So what did I think about this style of meal planning after a few weeks of testing it?
It is SO MUCH BETTER than the old way of planning meals from scratch every single week.
What I Loved About It
After the initial time I spent creating the calendar, which probably took 90 minutes, my weekly meal planning took less than 30 minutes. And most of that was spent finding lunch recipes, which would be eliminated if I continue with the same plan.
The key to using these themed dinners, and planning the whole month’s worth of meals like I did, is to choose recipes you love. Otherwise, you’ll have salmon planned for 3 weeks from now, and by the time you get to that date, you’ll decide that sounds awful.
Another thing I loved about using the themed dinners was that it gave me some structure. I really only had to find 2 or 3 recipes under each category to fill the whole month and that was very doable.
Theme dinners will definitely be a strategy I continue to use to make meal planning easier.
If you are looking for other ways to get in and out of the kitchen fast, check out my FREE cheat sheet with 10 Hacks to Help You Save Time in the Kitchen.
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