Here is a deep dive on the current rotation. In this post, I detail the current dinner rotation, recipes I’m using, prep notes, and why these meals made the cut.
The New Rotation
Week 1
Week 2
Monday
Sausage and pesto pasta with peas
Pasta e fagioli soup + rolls
Tuesday
Glazed salmon + fried rice
Sheet pan sausages + roasted potatoes and broccoli
Here is a deep dive on the current rotation. In this post, I detail the current dinner rotation, recipes I’m using, prep notes, and why these meals made the cut.
The NYT Cooking recipe above is perhaps the best chili that I’ve ever made. Don’t let the long list of ingredients intimidate you. I promise you have 80% of them in your pantry already, and the other 20% will bring you great joy.
I usually serve this with canned biscuits, crescent rolls, etc. Whatever is available where you do your shopping.
Leave 1-2 servings of chili in the fridge for lunches, and then freeze the rest in Souper Cubes to reuse in 2 weeks.
The salmon recipe above links to a specific teriyaki sauce. My kids and I prefer Bachan’s Japanese Barbecue Sauce. Use what your family likes.
If you think of it, pour the teriyaki sauce over the salmon in a bowl sometime in the afternoon and store it in the fridge until you’re ready to cook. Your salmon will be MUCH more flavorful if it can marinade for a few hours before you cook it.
I did not include a recipe for rice – I serve this meal with plain jasmine rice. I usually make some extra rice and then freeze the leftovers to repurpose later.
This dinner couldn’t be easier! Pick up a package of ravioli that look good to you – cheese, spinach, veg, meat….whatever! Cook according to the instructions on the package while your broccoli roasts. You could boost the flavor with a sauce, but we serve them plain to kids and drizzle with balsamic glaze, some olive oil, and parmesan for adults.
Simmer sauce with peas and paneer or chicken
Recipe inspiration
Chop your protein of choice – paneer (Indian cheese) or chicken – into bite size pieces and saute in a pan until cooked (the paneer doesn’t really have to cook, just brown it). Pour half a bag of peas into the pan, and then dump in a jar of simmer sauce.
Notes:
Have you discovered simmer sauces yet? They’ll change your life. I like the Maya Kaimal brand (we usually buy tikka masala or butter masala, which are not spicy and very flavorful), but there are many different brands and flavors. Try a few and see what you like.
Make the soup in the crockpot, but cook the tortellini on the stove just before you’re ready to serve. If you’re going to store leftovers, keep them separate. The tortellini get bloated and soggy sitting in the soup.
Marinating salmon in yogurt and then baking it freaked me out at first, but it is one of the best ways that I’ve found to bake salmon. It comes out so tender and delicious, with very little extra effort.
If you have a few minutes in the afternoon, get the marinade for the salmon going and let it sit in the fridge for a couple hours before cooking.
I started making my own pizza dough a few years ago, and it has been hard to go back. It takes less than 15 minutes to mix and knead it, plus a couple hours of rise time, and then you have delicious and fresh pizza dough to roll out and load up with toppings. My kids love to help roll it out and decorate mini pizzas, or you can do 2 big pizzas and choose the toppings yourself.
Top the pizzas with whatever you want! We start with a jar of pizza sauce, some mozzarella, and then clean out the fridge and freezer to top it. Sauteed or roasted veggies are great (zucchini, onion, bell pepper, mushrooms are some of my favorites), plus any proteins you’ve got lying around like leftover chicken breast, sausage crumbles, pepperoni.
Melissa eats her pizza salad IN her slice of pizza, but I like to have it as a side with fresh pizza. Do you!
These 2 recipes have different spins on stir fry, but you can do literally whatever you want and it will be delicious. I love to add some chopped pineapple at the end for some sweet bites, and sometimes add in shrimp as well. Anything goes.
Double the number of meatballs that you need for dinner, and store the extras in the freezer. In 2 weeks when you cook this again, you can pull them straight out of the freezer and just warm them up (I like to use the air fryer for this)
Both of the caesar salad recipes above include ingredients and instructions to make your own dressing, which of course is optional. If you want to make the dressing yourself, it will keep for about 2 weeks, so you could easily use it twice for dinners, or just use it for lunch salads in the meantime.
Why These Meals?
The fall is generally a very busy time of year for us, with a lot of new routines and activities. With that in mind, I made this menu to be very simple and straightforward so that I can put my time and thought into getting everyone where they need to be, rather than making a complicated dinner every night.
On the first cool day of fall, I am always eager to break out my crockpot and start making chili and soup, so my top priority was getting multiple of those recipes in here. We’ve got a busy evening of activities on Mondays, so that was a logical night to do a crockpot meal this fall. You could easily swap this to another day when you’ve got lots of activities to drive to, or when everyone is eating dinner at different times.
Our house is cleaned every other Wednesday afternoon, and I hate ruining it immediately by cooking, so we always do take out that day.
On weekends, when it is decent outside (above about 50º F), my husband wants to grill, so I leave the weekends for him to do that. He’ll usually grill burgers, brats, or chicken breasts one night over the weekend and we get take out or go out to eat the other night. Because of that, I left the weekends off this meal plan entirely.
Grocery Shopping and Prep
Having a meal plan for the week is a great first step, but it falls apart if you don’t follow through. Here’s how I structure my week to make sure I have everything that I need to cook the meals in my 2-week rotation.
(1) Keep your recipes in one place. Pick out the recipes that you want to make and put them in a note in your phone. This keeps everything accessible in the grocery store, in the kitchen, or when your family asks what’s for dinner.
(2) Build your master ingredient list. Copy-paste the list of ingredients from each recipe into the same note. Yes this is a bit tedious, but I promise it is worth the time and effort now. Future-you will be grateful!
(3) Do one main grocery run on Sunday or Monday. I buy everything on my ingredient list that is shelf stable, plus proteins for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday dinners.
(4) Do a quick midweek grocery refresh. I go back to the grocery store midweek for proteins and any other super perishable items for Thursday, Friday, and weekend dinners. This is a quick and targeted grocery run.
(5) Use your freezer strategically. I keep a number of proteins on hand in the freezer so I don’t have to constantly buy those. Costco ground beef and frozen chicken breasts are MVPs in this house! Set a recurring calendar reminder to thaw what you need the day before you’re cooking so they’ll be ready when you are.
The Meal Plan That Stuck 