Today is Thursday – does that mean it's pizza night in your house? Maybe taco night? Many of us grew up expecting a certain meal on a certain night of the week, and it's not just a thing of the past. Whether it's the same meal or even the same group gathered to eat it, do you have a weekly dinner tradition?
These weekly rituals are often planned around fun meals, giving everyone involved a little something special to look forward to during the day. Pizza and taco nights are the ones we hear about the most. Especially in the middle of a work week, the promise of a dinner that's fun and familiar can give you a boost.
We've also heard of people having salad for dinner every Monday as a way to detox from heavy eating over the weekend and start the week off with something light and healthy. It would certainly inspire us to try a lot of new salad combinations and recipes.
But these traditions don't necessarily have to do with the food itself. Maybe you get together with the same group of friends for dinner once a week, or head to a family dinner every Sunday.
Whatever the weekly routine, these nights can be serious business. They were even the subject of a piece from The Onion entitled "Son, You've Made a Mockery of Taco Night." If you've ever argued over hard shells vs. soft or encountered with the dreaded sour cream hog, you'll probably enjoy it.
Do you have any weekly dinner traditions? Tell us about it in the comments.
Related: Dinner Table Memories Of Days Gone By
(Image: Flickr user Right About Me, licensed under Creative Commons)
How To Cook Fluffy, Tasty Quinoa
Perfect Summer Cocktail Recipe: Honey Bourbon Lemonade
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Elizabeth Apron fro...
100 DIY Ideas for the 3-Day Weekend
Danielle's Charming, Classic Walk-Up
My roommate and I recently instituted Salad Tuesdays. The two of us alternate weeks choosing a recipe or style. It has quickly turned into our favorite night of the week. We've done Caesar (with homemade dressing and croutons), Cobb, Chopped Italian Salad, and a personal favorite - Spinach and Roasted Sweet Potato Salad with Bacon and Goat Cheese, among others. I blog about it so you can check out all of our variations!
http://dinnerblogging.blogspot.com/2010/03/spinach-and-sweet-potato-salad-with.html
During the winter, Monday night is soup night!!
Fridays mean homemade pizzas and either pepperoni and cheese or steak and cheese calzones - easy and quick with leftovers for an easy lunch on hectic Saturdays with the kids.
It's a lovely idea but I've never done it in practice-I rarely have the same meal twice in a fortnight. When I was a kid we had a roast chicken with all the trimmings EVERY Sunday and, ungrateful little sod that I was, it really bored me! To this day I can't stand the combination of chicken and lemon (Dad would stuff the chicken with a lemon every.single.week). I think it's probably made me go too far the other way! However I do have breakfast rituals-weekends means croissants, and I always have a baked egg if starting a new job/routine!
Pita Pizza Bar, and Hearty Chopped Salad night (Nicoise, Asparagus and Goat Cheese, something with proteins like nuts, cheese, eggs, and lots of chopped up veggies).
Most Sundays (except for now when the local farms are out until they grow up) my husband roasts a chicken. We'll eat it with whatever veggies are in season at the time and use the leftovers to make various salads/stir-fries/sandwiches later in the week.
I make pizza almost every week but not on any particular day.
Breakfast for dinner on Fridays because I just wasn't up for cooking a full dinner by the end of the work week, and most leftovers we gone. Homemade pizza on Saturdays because it tastes good and helps us to expand our toppings options.
Sunday brunch is always from the farmers market. We get up and hang out drinking tea/coffee until it opens at 10, then stock up on eggs, beef bacon, potatoes, veggies, etc. then go home and make the biggest, best brunch ever!
Growing up, Friday night was pizza, Dr.Pepper and Wheel of Fortune (allowed to watch tv while eating!!!)
These days our tradition is eating a kebab/kefta sandwich before or after going to see a movie.
I love to cook and really like to mix it up, but we have take-out pizza on Friday nights more often than I'd like to admit. Recently, however, I've started getting into roasting a whole chicken sometime over the weekend - and then turning the leftovers into stock (thanks, kitchn!).
One thing that's consistent, tho, is a lighted candle or two on the table whenever my husband and I eat dinner together. Even if it's a simple, quick meal, it always makes the time more special.
Sunday is roast day, and expected by my family all year round even in high summer (when we get it in the UK!) so we adapt it - full roast with roast potatoes and parsnips, yorkies, gravy and mashed swede in winter through to new potatoes and salad in summer.
Oh, man - I totally do this! I thought long and hard about choosing categories broad enough to allow for variation, and what to put on consecutive days.
Here's my plan:
Monday - chicken
Tuesday - Italian
Wednesday - fish
Thursday - soup & bread (may turn into big salad in the summer)
Friday - spicy ethnic (Indian, Mexican, Chinese, etc.)
It works well for us, and I love that I can fit in some meatless meals!
Growing up, Sunday night was always, always Chinese take out night.
As kids, there were three absolutes when it came to dinner:
Wednesday's soup and sandwich
Friday's pizza
there will be mashed potatoes on Sunday.
Now that I'm grown and cooking for myself, I don't have many of these, but I still gravitate toward pizza Friday... I deserve it delivered after a long week!
On Saturday nights while we were growing up we got to eat in front of the tv while watching Wild Kingdom and/or Disney. My mom was a good cook and I'm sure she must have cooked on Saturdays, but all I remember was box macaroni and cheese, sandwiches, or Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O's. Yes, I ate those and am still alive today to tell the tale. ;-)
We do family movie night on Saturdays at our house now, and I usually make something casual to eat while watching a movie (homemade pizza, nachos, tacos, chili).
Sunday night everyone fends for themselves, and I mix it up every other night.
My best friend and I both moved to Chicago last year, but live about 30 minutes away from one another when you factor in the city traffic. About a month after moving here we instituted "Wednesday night dinners." We take turns cooking dinner and dessert each week. The meal is always a surprise for the visitor, and it's always fun to come up with a meal for two instead of a meal for one!
We both love the tradition that we've instituted, and love having a night that is dedicated to making wonderful food and sweet memories.
Some of our dinners, but mostly desserts, are featured here:
http://teaspoonofvanilla.wordpress.com
Growing up, we never did. However, I lived with my aunt and uncle for about 4 months during grad school and they definitely had their nightly traditions. I know Monday was always sausage pizza from the same place. Wednesday was spaghetti night made from the same jarred sauce. Thursday night was dinner at the same restaurant with the same waitress where they ordered the same thing. Is it a wonder that I rarely if ever ate with them during that time frame??? BORING!
We didn't have anything like this when I was a kid, so I wanted to start some dinner traditions with my little girls. Right now, we plan on:
Mondays: soup
Wednesdays: stir fry
Fridays: homemade pizza
I'm a little looser with the soup and stir fry, but I really try to stick with pizza night! It's so fun to hear my two- and four-year-old girls say, "Hooray! Pizza night!"
Tuna Melt Tuesdays! The sides change (this week we had asparagus, if I'm feeling lazy we just have chips), but we have tuna melts every Tuesday.
We're also started doing Pizza and a Movie on Fridays - it's not every week, and sometimes we get delivery, sometimes we make pizza at home, but I'm hoping it becomes a tradition. It's good times.
During the winter Tuesday nights are usually something in the crock pot as I get home later than normal those nights and Thursdays is leftovers of that same meal or a variation thereof for that same reason. More times than not we have pizza on Fridays and dont' forget the Friday martini ritual. That is non-negotiable!
lately, sunday has been a pizza day, though this is far from intentional. when the weather is nice we grill a lot, and i often (the wife less often) put the grilled meats and veggies in a tortilla...
this thread and the onion article almost make me WANT to start a tradition, though... taco tuesday sounds good - as does a day of salads...
I love the idea of it but no, I've never had a weekly dinner tradition. I suspect it would make meal planning a lot easier.
A friend instituted a weekly "French night" which IMHO is brilliant! Mostly dishes from Julia Child's MAFC, I think. She may have replaced it with another international night more recently. Her kids are great adventurous eaters and it's a clear result of her consistent efforts in exploring all sorts of cuisines.
My parents are divorced and growing up my brother and I saw our father on Wednesday nights and every other weekend. We had some variety on the weekends, but I seem to remember a lot of burgers from a really delicious local burger place on Wednesdays. It wasn't an official tradition, but I definitely looked forward to a strong possibility of burgers and milkshakes.
I don't have a specific weekly tradition, but I do have sort of patterns: normally every week there is a tart, at least one egg dish, a pasta, etc. I shape what we eat around what comes in our CSA box, but usually those kinds of dishes pop up.
Sunday's are my big cook days. I can easily spend 5 hours cooking that day. I also typically bake and/or make a dessert from scratch that day and share it with everyone who lives in my building (there are only a few apts). Needless to say, it's a lot of fun, tasty and very relaxing!
saer
http://cravenmaven.wordpress.com
In an effort to make Monday something to look forward to instead of dread we have gourmet night. We cook a nice meal and open up a delicious bottle of wine. It helped turn manic Monday into yeah Monday! Now Mondays are one of our favorite days of the week.
Wednesday nights are kids get B'fast dinner as my husband and I head out for our weekly date night. Friday's we then do Pizza, PJ, Picnic Party. We cook home made Pizza, everyone gets in their PJ's and we do a picnic dinner in the family room while we watch a movie. Kids love it and get very upset if we don't do PPPP on Friday nights!
Our definite never-a-change tradition is potato and egg tacos (NOT eggs and potato) every Sunday night. Even if my husband and I go out to dinner, my daughter needs me to fix them before I leave (did I mention she's 22 years old?). Apparently, hers just aren't the same....
My parents are all about routine. Every once and a while, I try to shake things up for them! Usually we have spaghetti with bolognese sauce every Wednesday, maple salmon every Friday, steak on Saturday, and roast chicken on Sunday. It's fabulous, but it's also nice to change things up.
I don't have any dinner rituals, but I eat two eggs on multigrain toast with light cream cheese for breakfast almost every day.
I've been wanting to try this at home for a while. My 4-year-old is an extremely picky eater while my 2-year-old loves anything and everything... it's always a challenge.
During my childhood, Saturday night was pizza night. We ordered a pepperoni pizza from Domino's and were allowed to have root beer and eat off of paper plates in front of the TV.
I think baked potato night would be fun - top with broccoli and cheese, chili, or dress it up as a tuna melt.
Growing up, Friday night was always pizza night. My friends always used to want to have sleep overs at my house on Fridays because we always ate pizza. I remember that we were such regulars that the local pizza parlor gave us 2 large pizzas for $16 and I think my dad managed to get a couple free t-shirts from them over the years.
Since it's Friday and all, I think I might just have to have pizza night!
In the year that my honey and I have been living together, we've gotten into the habit of making a British-style "fry up" breakfast on Saturday or Sunday morning: bacon, eggs, hash browns, toast. It's our way of compromising between my attempts to feed him healthy food and his love of bacon! He gets his bacon once a week, but I drain off most of the bacon fat before I cook his eggs (and he toasts his bread rather than frying it in the bacon fat as well).
We usually go out for dinner on Thursday nights, often for Indian food (something else he misses from growing up in the UK).
Every Saturday morning we have a huge breakfast of sinful foods. We dress for Sunday dinners (suit and tie and evening gown) and have a candlelit 5 course gourmet dinner at home. My young daughters love it and I enjoy eating grown up food.
When I lived in Dubai in the 1980s Thursday evenings (the start of the weekend) were celebrated with fresh mango juice and felafel sandwiches.