Next Week's Meal Plan

This week I'm going heavy on asparagus, peas, radishes, lemon, and fresh herbs.

These budget-friendly dinners are quick, low-effort, and keep the dirty dishes to a minimum.

We love this meal plan from Cup of Jo! Easy shrimp tacos, kid-friendly chicken parm meatballs, and pizza night: it's basically the perfect week.

Give 2020 a send-off with a week that includes some of the absolute easiest dinners you can put on the table.

Everyone around the table will love these satisfying dinners.

Get ready for a week of dinners that are easy and comforting.

This no-nonsense meal plan will leave your taste buds happy and your kitchen with minimal mess.

Start here, whether you're curious about the Mediterranean diet or just want inspiration to fill your meal plan with fresh and summery feel-good dinners.

I'm looking at my slow cooker to feed us easy dinners without heating up the kitchen.

It's what we're all craving right now: simple, summery, and comforting.

Looking for some comfort food, even as the temps hit in the 80s?

I am keeping meals easy this week and definitely not forgetting about Pizza Friday.

Quick, simple, and totally delicious.

All these meals make for great leftovers, too.

Because one-pot or one-pan means minimal dishwashing for me.

With plenty of freezer-friendly leftovers to give yourself a break from cooking later.

Remember pizza pinwheels? Put your leftover pasta sauce in them.

"I'm not just cooking for myself; I'm cooking for my boyfriend and his mother, the two loved ones I am staying with for the foreseeable future."

They start with basic pantry staples, like pasta, rice, and lentils, and come with a lot of flexibility, so you can easily pull a meal together with whatever you have on hand.

Consider this your survival guide: They're easy and satisfying, with hardly any dirty dishes.

These dinners lean hard on pantry ingredients, so they're also easy on your wallet.

Skip the possibility of takeout.

On cold, dreary, winter weeknights, you need the power of carbs and comfort food.

It's the coziest way to feed your family of six (or stock your freezer with leftovers!) this winter.

Andrea Mathis, the creator of Beautiful Eats and Things, knows how to keep things wholesome and delicious!

These dinners are wholesome, comforting, and totally delicious.

Here's the dinner inspiration you need.

They're packed with vegetables, so you'll feel as good as they taste.

Don't let winter go by without making these (spoiler alert: there's a Cheesy Taco Tater Tot Hotdish!).

Best of all, they come together in about 30 minutes.

These fit low-glycemic dietary requirements, are gluten-free, and kid-friendly!

Because the meal train can only last so long.

These are the back-pocket dinners your meal plan needs.

Here's how to feed your family of eight (or stock your freezer with tasty leftovers!).

The founder of Grandbaby Cakes has five pitch-perfect meals for the season.

Sweet Potato Soul is serving up a week of dinners that keep her nourished as a new mom — and are vegan!

Yep, these dinners check all the boxes.

It's one of our most-requested meal plan ideas.

These 5 easy dinners are inspired by a geography-loving second grader.

Every dish is gluten-free and dairy-free, as well!

These vegan dinners will keep you well-fed.

These easy, delicious meals are also anti-inflammatory and nutrient-dense.

Just for fun, I let my 5-year-old daughter make this week’s meal plan. As you might guess, her dinner choices are basic kid fare — with requests for macaroni, cheeseburgers with fries, and even pancakes for dinner — but I’m definitely inspired by her plan’s simplicity, ease, and flair for fun. The challenge is making sure that all her carb-rich picks are balanced with plenty of vegetables without making too much extra work for the grown-ups.

Some weeks our meal plan has a clear goal or theme that runs through it, and other weeks it’s just a collection of recipes that look delicious. This week’s challenge, though, is that most of what I’m craving right now — fast and fancy summer suppers — doesn’t feel super kid-friendly on paper. So this week I’m sharing the meals I’m making, plus how I’ll adapt, rename, or rework these recipes to get — fingers-crossed!

Not a bean or rice dinner in sight!

A good friend and her family just went dairy-free to see if they can clear up some skin and digestion issues in their littlest kiddo. The rest of the family is lamenting the loss of ice cream, but this mom is missing her family’s favorite dinners that used to make meal planning easy. This week’s meal plan is a bit self-serving in order to help my own friend (but many readers are looking to go dairy-free too.) Still, I pinky promise that the recipes are easy and delicious as always.

Are you ever curious about what Kitchn editors cook and eat at home? You might be surprised at how often we cook new recipes for dinner or how often we cook recipes from the site at home. You’ve got to practice what you preach, right? I thought I’d start by sharing what I’m cooking for my family of four this week from Kitchn recipes. Every Friday night I sit down with my planner and a cocktail and choose a week’s worth of dinners for the week ahead.

You guys, this weekend I totally blew my grocery budget for the week at the farmers market. As has become an almost annual tradition, I spent a small fortune on two giant buckets of local strawberries. I have zero regrets. I’ll turn those strawberries into a small batch of jam and some fruit leather, and freeze what we don’t eat fresh for smoothies. But this splurge means I have to be thrifty when it comes to meal planning this week.

Do you ever follow a weekend of dining out with a strong craving for vegetables? That’s where my head (and stomach) is at this week while meal planning. This past weekend we ate a ton; we had my husband’s family over for barbecue and ate so much cake (not to celebrate — I had leftovers from recipe testing). Plus my work week ahead is filled with testing more cakes, a trifle or two, cheesecake, two types of cookies, a pie, and five no-bake desserts.

On the heels of Memorial Day barbecues and picnics, we have a ton of leftovers in the fridge. Not wanting to waste any of it — and hoping to cut myself some slack on meal prep this week — I’m basing my meal plan on what’s left in the fridge this week. Not to worry — most of my leftovers are classic Memorial Day fare.

Summer has officially hit full swing around here. My kids have started their various summer camps, which include a later wake-up time and bedtime, pushing dinner a little later into the evening each day. This transition from our normal school year routine to our summer one is so refreshing after how crazy jam-packed our May calendar was. This week’s meal plan is all about welcoming summer into our kitchen.

My meal-planning routine has changed a bit since summer started. Instead of doing all my planning on Friday night, I wait until after the farmers market on Saturday to formulate a plan. I give myself a budget for buying eggs, vegetables, fruit, and bread (always buy the bread) at the market and just buy whatever looks great that week. After we get home with our haul, I put things away, make a plan, and grocery shop for staples or missing ingredients in the afternoon.

This week I’m traveling to New York for a photo shoot with the Kitchn team and my husband is in charge of feeding the kids. My husband is a great cook, even though he doesn’t do it regularly, but he isn’t very confident in the kitchen so he chooses simple, easy dishes plus a few things I won’t normally cook that he and the kids love. Here’s what our family’s meal plan looks like when my husband is in charge of dinner for the week.

Every once in a while, I get a week free from obligations — calendar or budget — and can just choose recipes that are new, enticing, or have just been on my to-try list for too long. This is one of those rare weeks, and how it fell in the middle of summer when produce is at its peak I’ll never know, but I’m thanking my lucky stars. This week’s meal plan features a bunch of seasonal suppers that have had me drooling.

This weekend, two moving containers were delivered to our driveway and slowly but surely filled with everything in our Georgia home. Left are a few kitchen staples and enough clothing for each of us to “camp out in our house” and on the road for the next two weeks.

This week my daughter started kindergarten in her new school in our new city. We’re still working on finding preschool for our littlest kiddo, but it feels like we are finding our way back to a regular school-year schedule. After a hectic summer, it feels glorious. I imagine most of you are in the same boat we are: looking for easy weeknight dinners that will make this first week back into a new schedule enjoyable.

This week I’m getting back on the meal-planning wagon after two weeks of traveling and settling into our new home. Honestly, I’d happily continue eating makeshift meals of sandwiches, takeout, and frozen pizza in an effort to avoid cooking amongst the half-packed boxes, but alas, with school starting back this week we need our routine up and running again.

I’ve been savoring the last weeks of summer in September — making tomato sandwiches and buying berries at the farmers market to fill up the freezer — but suddenly the temperatures have dropped and all I want to do is bake and make chili. Our meal plan this week is driven by those cravings, with a chicken chili you can pull off any night of the week and not one but two sheet pan suppers that can cook alongside a batch of morning glory muffins or cornbread.

My husband is finally home after a few weeks of traveling for work, and I am taking full advantage of him being home to help with dinner and kid wrangling. We’re celebrating him being home, his belated birthday, and a new home with a week of our family’s favorite dinner. There’s nothing fancy in the meal plan this week — just five classic family favorites, from lasagna to enchiladas, that are all quick and easy to put together.

October is hands-down my favorite month of the year and it has almost nothing to do with it being my birthday month. Nope, I love October for its gorgeous, cool weather, apple picking, and pumpkin carving. But I also underestimate how busy October can be. We happen to be moving from our apartment to our new house this week, which means our fall-inspired dinners need to be fast and easy. Here’s what I’m cooking this week to quickly feed my family and also celebrate the season.

One of my strategies for keeping our budget in check is to have about a 50/50 mix of meaty and meatless dinners each week. But when I’ve busted my budget — say, after moving into a new house and splurging on a new dining table — a week of meatless dinners can save me. This week’s meal plan is full of new-to-us vegetarian recipes that use inexpensive staples to keep our grocery budget low.

My husband's meal plan is full of cozy comfort food.

Some weeks the meal plan just flows out. Monday through Friday gets filled out in about 10 minutes. But other weeks, like this one, when I feel uninspired or bored by meal planning, I take requests from my family to fill up our week. I consulted my favorite diners, my husband and two kiddos, for their meal requests this week and used them to plan a week of fall-feeling, family-friendly dinners for the last bit of October. Planning my weekly meals is a habit I enjoy.

Welp, the holidays and wintery weather have descended upon us (read: my entire house has come down with some terrible, no good, very bad cold). My recovery game plan? A whole week of hearty soups. I’m making their benefits twofold by making double batches of each and freezing extras for the crazy weeks ahead. Planning my weekly meals is a habit I enjoy.

This week is bookended by Christmas tree hunting and cookie decorating adventures, along with a few parties and a family birthday dinner, so my dinner objective is to feed us plenty of vegetables and protein without much fuss. I’m still planning on making my family’s favorite comfort foods, like pasta and pizza, but they’ll be filled with vegetables to help balance out the celebratory feasts we’ll be having elsewhere during the week.