Next Week’s Meal Plan: 5 Easy Meals for Busy Holiday Weeks

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.

Planning my weekly meals is a habit I enjoy. Since I’m frequently asked by friends and family what I’m cooking for dinner each week, I thought it’d be useful to share my weekly meal plan here. Whether you’re just learning to meal plan and looking for a real-life example of how this works or you’re an old pro on the hunt for inspiration, here’s a peek at how I’m feeding my family this week.

• The Beginner’s Guide to Meal Planning: What to Know, How to Succeed, and What to Skip
• The Best Way to Use a Weekend for Meal Planning Success
• Ask Yourself These 5 Questions Before You Start Meal Planning
• 5 Strategies for Picking Recipes for a Week of Meal Planning

My 6-year-old is having a love affair with cauliflower right now, so I’m happy to tuck it into dinner once a week or more as long as she’s eating it up. But this pasta dish also pleases a picky 3-year-old and my husband with its pizza-like qualities.

This lentil salad is everything you want to eat during the winter: tender lentils, roasted sweet potatoes, toasty pecans, and sharp onions with strands of kale. My kids will actually eat this sans kale and with toasted bread on the side. I’ll make a huge batch to eat for lunches this week too.

This pork stew is a perfect weeknight dinner party recipe. You can start it in the morning before work, come home and throw a salad together and cut up some crusty bread, and welcome guests with cold cider and this incredible stew. That’s exactly what we intend to do in the middle of the week.

This was my husband’s dinner request and he’s throwing this together, as he has recently taken to experimenting with the Instant Pot. We are swapping white rice for brown and will go easy on the spices for the kiddos, but this is a family favorite.

I’m totally going out on a limb with this one, because pizza with kale is hard to pass by my kids, but this is what I’m craving for pizza Friday! I’ll make sure there’s extra dough to make more pizzas without kale, just in case.