Our Meal Rotation: Easy Meal Planning [& Sample Weeks]
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through my link but does not change your price.
A bit over a year ago we set up a meal rotation that completely changed our home. When I have mentioned it over on Instagram I have always gotten questions so I figured I would go into how it works. Quite a while ago now we started this for breakfast. We were feeling burnt out from oatmeal every single day and overwhelmed trying to come up with other ideas in the mornings. Some mornings I would make sheet pancakes but it wasn’t consistent and most mornings we halfheartedly fell back to oatmeal. Establishing the breakfast meal rotation completely changed that and after a few months of that we added a dinner rotation as well.
Our breakfast rotation started with what we were eating anyway: oatmeal, sheet pancakes, waffles on Sunday, yogurt on Saturday, occasional eggs, etc. We then established the meal plan of oatmeal on Monday, sheet pancakes on Tuesday and Thursday, savory on Wednesday, overnight oats on Friday, yogurt or muffins on Saturday, and French Toast or waffles on Sunday. This gives us enough variety that we do not get bored but has it predictable enough we aren’t blankly staring at the fridge when we don’t want oatmeal in the morning. We also mix up within each category. With oatmeal, for example, we occasionally do something like carrot cake or baked oatmeal. We also mix in different nut butters, etc. For sheet pancakes we usually do apple sheet pancakes one day and often just a sourdough one the other day or a dutch baby but if I find a fun new idea I’m always game to try. Savory day is the most diverse. Some examples include huevos rancheros with homemade corn tortillas, breakfast burritos with homemade sourdough tortillas, dill salmon eggs, and omelets.
Our dinner rotation is a bit looser because we tend to crave a bit more variety there. Our basic rotation for dinner is curry or stir fry on Monday, pasta on Tuesday, soup on Wednesday, and Mexican (or Mexican-inspired) on Thursday. On Friday night we generally do soup, salmon, a starch vegetable, a green vegetable, and a grain. That is our big ritual meal of the week and we love to have soup with it but I often found it too much to make soup for it. So instead I make soup on Wednesday and make enough to serve it on Friday for the soup course. Saturday night we do leftovers. Sundays we like to experiment with a new recipe. In particular, if we notice a specific recipe we will do it then since my husband prefers cooking with recipes and I tend to like cooking more loosely.
The rotation has been refined over time and will continue to change. For example, we added soup to the rotation this fall but likely it will be removed come summer when we don’t want soup every week. We used to have bowls on the rotation but found a lot of overlap between that and stirfry/curry. My goal is to reduce the overwhelm of choosing and having less overlap makes that easier for me.
Each category had to meet a few requirements to be included. I needed at least one recipe I could make quickly and easily with pretty much no thought. For example, stir fry, pasta with marinara, and squash curry soup can all be done incredibly quickly and require basically no thought. I also needed at least one recipe for each category I could make with pantry staples if we hadn’t gone grocery shopping or something fell through last minute with a recipe. We buy things like canned diced tomatoes at Costco and try to always keep frozen vegetables on hand for those times.
Ideally on Sunday, we sit down to make the menu for the week. This doesn’t always happen though and I love that the meal rotation reduces the mental load of that. We always have the ingredients to cover the week if needed. So if it happens to be we didn’t plan anything and it’s now Monday, I have a quick recipe in mind. Any day of the week I can come up with something day of without too much stress because of the categories.
Here are three sample weeks of menus! When possible I linked a recipe. I don’t often cook with recipes so they’re not all linked.
Meal Rotation 3 Week Examples:
Week 1
Monday: coconut milk vegetable curry
Tuesday: creamy broccoli pasta with a salad
Wednesday: tomato soup (I sub veggie stock) with grilled cheese
Thursday: Mexican rice with refried beans and vegetables
Friday: salmon, sweet potato, asparagus, forbidden rice, and tomato soup
Saturday: leftovers
Sunday: chili pepper tofu from our favorite cookbook served with rice
Week 2
Monday: stir fry with pad thai noodles
Tuesday: jalapeño popper pasta (we added spinach) with breaded cauliflower
Wednesday: pho with egg and tofu
Thursday: egg tacos with homemade corn tortillas and refried beans
Friday: salmon, asparagus, sweet potatoes, rice, and pho
Saturday: leftovers
Sunday: saag paneer with homemade naan
Week 3
Monday: Paneer Makhani
Tuesday: simple vodka sauce pasta (with chickpea pasta) with sweet potatoes and asparagus
Wednesday: squash curry soup with rolls
Thursday: crispy jalapeño cheese tacos
Friday: salmon, potatoes, cauliflower, fried rice, and squash curry soup
Saturday: leftovers
Sunday: tempe with bok choy and tomato sambal from our favorite cookbook served with rice
In terms of lunch we pretty much always do leftovers. On days we do not have leftovers we will usually do eggs and toast or, occasionally, boxed mac and cheese.
Sunday we sit down to discuss the plans for the week and make a shopping list. Ideally, we go shopping Sunday but that doesn’t always happen. Sunday dinner can be more or less elaborate, often depending on what we have and whether we have time to shop and cook both.
I will note, my children do eat everything. I acknowledge this is so much more challenging with more particular eaters. My daughter does not have the highest spice tolerance (yet, she’s only 12 months!) so there are some things I reduce the spice on slightly from what I would use otherwise but we do still always cook with spice, etc.
