Category: Home Sweet Home

What to Cook for Dinner

There’s an endless refrain in every extended conversation among friends: What to cook for dinner. I have a simple trick that I use whenever I get frustrated with menu planning.

Whenever I’m stumped I grab a trusty spiral notebook and turn to a clean page. Those notebooks are plentiful in my house, so this is the easy part. Then I list Monday – Sunday across the top. Then I just assign a type of meal to each day, including 1 or more delivery or takeout or eat out options.

Coming up with ideas for what to cook for dinner:

Stack of 5 cookbooks plus one open to chicken recipes. Each cookbook is for a different label: desserts, vegetarian, healthy, cooking, recipes,
What will you cook for dinner?

Here are some examples but the possibilities are endless:

Monday – chicken

Tuesday – Vegetarian

Wednesday – breakfast for dinner

Thursday – pasta

Friday – eat out, or pick-up, or delivery, maybe even frozen pizza

Saturday – Fish or seafood (tuna casserole or salmon patties count)

Sunday – crockpot favorite

Once you have a category, the ideas of what to cook will flow!

As an example, I can think of 5 or 6 meals based on chicken easily. Same with something in the crockpot. Laying out categories is the secret and that’s actually more fun than any part of what’s for dinner other than dessert.

More What to Cook for Dinner categories

Here are more category ideas just so you can see how easy it is to get the ideas flowing: Chinese food, Anything over rice or noodles, Air Fryer favorites, Mexican food, Thai, Leftover buffet, Quiche or Pot Pies, Italian, Beef, Pork, InstaPot favorite, Soup and Salad, Grill out, Picnic favorites, and more. Your imagination is everything and it can change every time you use this trick.

I cleaned the freezer and made a vow

I just finished something I’ve been avoiding for years. And when I say years, I’m thinking 2018 or before. I have called my freezer the “black hole” for that long and still continued to buy stuff and shove it in, never to be seen again.

My black hole of a freezer was taunting me

Upright freezer full of storage bags with frozen food and an arm reaching in to place a small bag

Today I fixed that. I motivated myself to clean the freezer with “just one shelf” and it worked. The empty shelf was motivating and I kept going. Now I have a few things left in the freezer and plenty of cleared space.

I go way back with freezer stories, including a recent kitchen drama when a sausage link came out of my ice dispenser at the worst possible moment. We are not completely recovered from that yet, although it has provided several people with snorts of laughter at my expense.

A freezer is easy to clean if you can be ruthless

Today’s haul included things labeled “best by June 2016” if that gives you an idea of how much was freezer burned and trashed. The one thing that kept me from mulling over possibilities for too long was that we had a big power outage in August of 2020 and I was able to tell myself that anything prior to that needed to go. And it did. I carried bag after bag to the trash.

So the vow I mentioned? I’m making a list – an inventory if you will of what’s left in the freezer and I vow to plan my eating around those things and then replace only what I truly will eat. And the rest of that vow is that I will not buy anything, no matter how “on sale” it is, that I don’t have a plan to use before the expiration date.

What’s next if the freezer’s clean?

Watch out pantry, I’m coming for you next. It has to be easier than thinning either bookcases, right?