How many times have you asked yourself or your partner “What’s for dinner?”. Surely we all have related to this meme:
Who knew that the hardest part of being an adult was figuring out what you want to cook for dinner every ingle night for the rest of your life.
Well, I have the solution! Seriously! A one-time set up, totally free answer so that you never have to ask that question again. I’m sure there are apps or programs out there that also do this and maybe they throw in some recipe sharing flair, but this system has worked extremely well for us for the last few months. Plus you get that fun feeling of being excited/surprised when you find out what’s on the menu! Annnd, a grocery list that can be repeated without the effort of writing it out from scratch!
How to make your own
Starting from Scratch
Okay, so to get started, you need to write down all the meals you currently like to cook. Anything you’re confident in making and just put it in one place:
You can use this snapshot of my list for a bit of inspiration, but it’s best to have a think about your favorite meals, that way you can be very confident and excited in what you’re committing to make
Then you create a new google calendar for dinners - I recommend sharing this with everyone in your household.
Mapping your menu
Finally, this part takes a bit of time, but now you’ll start to build your personal menu:
Make a note of how many recipes you have on your list - I repeated about every 2 months, but I think you could do this every month too!
Once you have this number, you can determine how often to repeat. If you’re doing one recipe every day, you’ll need 28 recipes for 4 weeks, but remember, the goal is to work smarter, so think about what recipes you have that can feed you/your family for two days. For instance, I have ours set up so we cook every 4 days but it feeds us for 7 meals. That way we each only cook twice in a given week.
Once you’ve got all this gathered, you’re ready to create the events:
Add your dish name in the title of the event
In the description, past the recipe you’re using or a link to the website. If you want to get really fancy ass a list of the ingredients you’ll need (this will help with grocery shopping)
Under the date section of the event, select all day, and the select repeat > custom > every [ ] weeks according to the schedule you determined above
Add all your recipes
And that’s it! You can adjust whenever you have a new recipe to add or one you’d like to retire. I think you could even make a seasonal menu for spring/summer and winter fall and just turn it on or off depending on the weather, seasonal ingredients, or your mood!
A few tips to keep in mind as you go about creating your calendar:
Think about any recurring scheduling items you’d like to avoid with your cooking schedule. We have a recurring commitment after work on Mondays, Wednesdays , and Fridays, so we have it set that we eat leftovers on those days.
Also think about whether you’d like to incorporate a place for new recipes, there are a couple of ways to do this:
Schedule a “New Recipe” day every month or so and use this as a place to collect all the mouthwatering recipes from your favorite tiktok creators or the newest dish from Bon Apetit’s test kitchen, or even just something you’re craving that you’d like to learn how to make - I really recommend this if you like to cook.
The other option is to use categories for some of your recipes but not strict recipes - you’ll see that my calendar has a menu item for Fried rice or stir fry - that gives me space to try new variations on those classic dishes.
Think about any other lifestyle choices this plan can support - want to eat more vegetarian? Want to use seasonal veggies? Want to reduce waste or shop more sustainably? Consider integrating some of those goals right into your meal plan.