Do you often look down at your plate and think, This again? Does making dinner feel like a chore? Has cooking become boring? Sounds like you're in a dinner rut. Here are five ideas for getting out of it and making the evening meal fun again.
1. Try new recipes. Sounds simple enough, but how many times do you bookmark a bunch of recipes or dog-ear the pages of a food magazine and never look at those recipes again? Try incorporating one new recipe a week into your meal rotation and make a note of the keepers. It helps to create a folder — either physical or online — to stash recipes you find that are legitimate dinner candidates, so you have them all in one place.
2. Buy a new ingredient. Pick up a vegetable you've never tried at the farmers market, a new type of grain at the grocery store, or an unusual condiment at an ethnic market. If you're not sure how to use it, ask the seller, a knowledgeable-looking fellow shopper or Google. (Or you can always ask us!) You just might find a new dinner staple.
3. Eat out. Try changing up your order at a favorite restaurant, or going to a new restaurant for inspiration. Places that change their menus based on the seasons are especially good sources for new ideas. Make note of flavor, texture or ingredient combinations that you love, or even plating tricks that make dinner look more appealing.
4. Get your family involved. If you usually come up with the dinner menu every night on your own, try asking your partner or kids for their input on the weekly meals. You might be surprised and even inspired by what they want to eat, and they are likely to be more interested in the dinner that comes pre-stamped with their seal of approval.
5. Keep a dinner diary. Remove the burden of planning and remembering from your brain and put it in a notebook or spreadsheet. This makes it easy to look back and find the dinners that were a big hit, and expand your repertoire beyond the small number of meals you can remember offhand.
What are your best tips for getting out of a dinner rut?
Related: 15 Tips for Better Weekly Meal Planning
(Image: Forster Forest/Shutterstock)
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For me, trying new recipes is by far the best way to break through the monotony of eating the same thing all the time. Even on a weeknight, a new recipe doesn't have to be complicated and sometimes I'll just use it as a guide rather than following it to the letter but its a good way to shake things up.
Start a food blog and commit to posting at least once a week. I started one a few months ago and it has both given me encouragement to help create new recipes as well as a way to remember the good recipes I have created. Now, I have no expectations of making any money at it but that does not matter. What helps is that it gets you to type up the way you made something delicious so you can make it again, and it gets you to try making something new. Also by committing to posting at least weekly you are committing to trying enough new recipes that at least one is delicious enough to be post worthy.
http://sailingsavorsingle.blogspot.com if you are curious.
Buy a couple of new cookbooks and just start trying the recipes in them.
Explore a different cuisine! Go French, Mexican, Italian, German, Japanese, Thai, etc.
Funny, I went through this just last week. I still enjoyed cooking and eating, but it wasn't always going well, and I had a real feeling of discouragement. I had trouble remembering why it mattered. For me, cooking a good dinner is an expression of my creativity as well as a way of sharing something I've created with my family. It's very important to me! Foolishly so, probably. It's so easy for dinner to seem like a chore, for something so basic and everyday to seem mundane and lacking in value. I was having trouble mustering the energy to rise above that feeling. I wrote this about it...
It’s so easy to forget about the importance of ordinary tasks, about the extraordinariness of doing them, not well, but with a full heart. It takes an effort to make these tasks, these inherently necessary and essential tasks, significant as well.
So I went back and made the first thing that I had invented, years ago, that gave me great pleasure to make and to share. It's a double crusted pie stuffed with roasted mushrooms, french lentils, spinach and smoked gouda. It's a delight to make - not difficult, but just complicated enough to be fun. And it's very nourishing and delicious. It helped to bring back my sense of joy in making and sharing food.
http://outoftheordinaryfood.com/2013/03/14/double-crusted-pie-with-roasted-mushrooms-french-lentils-and-spinach-the-ur-ordinary-pie/
I love the photo of this beautiful boy!
Happy birthday yesterday! I started a directionless blog a few years ago, and sometimes it was about food, but now it's just about my pregnancy. Oh well!
Hmm, sometimes I'm struck at how different my life as a wife is from my mother's (she's 75), and this post sparked that thought. She's a good cook, not because she had an interest in it, but because she HAD to ever since she was 11 years old. She's ALWAYS viewed cooking as a chore and I don't think she's ever really "enjoyed" it. Me, on the other hand, didn't have to start cooking until I was in my 20s (went gluten-free in the late 90s and there were no other choices at that time) and slowly fell in love with it. I get totally excited by recipes and absolutely love what I make.
Claireooto, I just wanted to let you know that I'm always inspired by your posts on these boards. It just seems like you are always creating in the kitchen, and the flavor combinations you mention are always unexpected but sound delicious. Your family is so lucky to have such a dedicated and creative chef at home! In a way, it's a relief to hear that even someone like you, who seems to be overflowing with ideas, sometimes gets a bit burnt out. But you are so right, going back to the basics is sometimes just what we need to help us hit the restart button. Keep at it, and thanks again for your posts, I really do find them to be a delight.
babygrace - thank you so much for the kind words! I feel like such a nuisance on the Kitchn sometimes! You really made my day.
And I do have a lot of ideas about cooking (insomnia-fueled, mostly!) but I do have a lot of doubting moments as well. One time I got out of a rut by reading my sons' "Weird but True" book, about animals that have oddly sensitive tasters, or only eat standing in one direction! It makes you think about a different way to think about what you taste!
http://outoftheordinaryfood.com/2012/09/04/chocolate-saltine-almond-balls-and-french-cake-cookies/
a agree with one of your other commenters - start a food blog! no one wants to read about the same cake over and over so it does challenge you to work your way thru all your photocopied/torn out recipes.
then again, what do we do with our favourites?? :-)
I'm with yoohoo -- wonderful photo of that child!
Thanks so much for the pie recipe, Claireooto. I'm trying to get more lentils into my diet, and that looks like a winner!
Thanks for the Birthday wish and thanks even more for the proof that you actually read my blog and thus my post about the individual mini lemon layer cake.
Thanks for the Birthday wish and thanks even more for the proof that you actually read my blog and thus my post about the individual mini lemon layer cake.
I just love the picture of the little boy- so cute :)
My husband and I did a vegan, gluten free challenge during the month of February. In doing so, we made so many new things -- mainly because it's a pain to eat out on such a strict diet. It was great for new ideas and using veggies/grains I haven't used in a long time, if ever. Now, some of those recipes are in our recipe arsenal.
Our gas stove malfunctioned and had to be repaired - the needed part took a month to order. We were allowed to turn on our gas supply to the stove intermittently, but it was very awkward to reach, so I ended up cooking every 2-3 nights and storing leftovers to reheat in the microwave. It just got repaired and I am grateful to have the chance to cook dinner! I will not take this for granted any longer.
Well, if it is kids, then they like ruts. My mother made the same seven or eight dinners over and over again (and my dad cooked too) and I never, ever tired of them. In fact I wish sometimes I had her simple repertoire down. I think I'll make a list of what it was and see if I can replicate that.
I tend to make a big pan of something on Sunday--baked pasta or roasted veg & sausages, and just eat it for 3 or 4 days. But I don't mind eating the same thing over & over if it is delicious! My other thing is buying a rotisserie chicken on Friday night, having chicken & veg that night, then following day eat chicken sandwiches, then pick all the meat off the carcass and make a gratin with it--then use the carcass to make chicken broth & soup for the week. A $5.00 chicken goes a long way!