Management reserves the right to change this menu up to the day a meal is planned.

I am sure this is not a problem unique to my household…but it is one of the problems that takes up too much of my brain.

Every week before I shop I ask if anyone has any dinner ideas for the week ahead and no one really answers and then I have to come up with five or six dinner ideas (depending on when our next shop will be) and then it’s Sunday again and we repeat the process.

It’s not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, but it is something I’ve always wondered if I could fix.

And I don’t know if this does fix it - but I’m hoping it helps move things in the right direction.

I hinted a couple of weeks ago that I may do this - I created a menu for pretty much the whole month of February.

It’s a lot of the same old stuff, but instead of thinking, “Hm, did we have this last week or was that the week before,” I can be sure it’s reasonably spread out and we’re not eating pasta too much or chicken every night or what have you.

Not every meal is a crowd favorite - it can’t be, since everyone here likes such different things - but it affords the opportunity to everyone to look at what dinner they might not want to partake in and do something else. (Ramen noodles, for example, or a microwaveable Mac and cheese.)

And it’s certainly not set in stone. But if I have to change a meal during the week it is much easier for me to think of one stand-alone meal than to have to think of six things at once, while weighing all of those factors I mentioned, like when we last had said meal or are we eating it too often within a month, etc.

I’m less concerned about vegetables and sides - those can be repeated more often and are less of a weekly burden.

This will also hopefully cut down on takeout and save a little scratch. We started doing takeout weekly during the pandemic to help support some of the local businesses and I really love it, it’s something I look forward to, but it’s not the most economical move. Maybe we’ll slowly shift to once a month, or every six weeks.

February was a good month to start with because it’s only 28 days. But this is definitely something I’d like to continue. Especially through the winter, since that’s when we’re home the most and the meals are uninterrupted by activities - sports, dance, school stuff.

I might have stumbled upon a good idea here.

We’ll see how this month turns out.