If you’re sick of cooking and out of ideas, I’ve got you covered! Keep mealtime simple and stress-free by rotating through these 14 family-friendly dinner ideas.

What’s for dinner? If you’re the one planning and cooking meals for a family, you likely get this question a lot.

Even if you enjoy cooking, being the one to come up with nutritious meal ideas that everyone will eat can get tiring. Keeping a list of family favorite meals is a great way to decrease the stress of planning dinners. By varying the protein in common meals and making simple swaps to side dishes, you can maintain variety without having to think of completely new dinner ideas. Consider the following meal planning guidelines and simple dinner ideas to make your own easy meal rotation.

Guidelines To Weekly Meal Planning

Before I get to the dinner ideas, I want to first share a few recommendations.

I work with many busy families in my practice, and I know firsthand how hard it can be to find meal ideas that everyone in the family likes. These are simple suggestions I share with my clients when I teach weekly meal planning.  Please remember these as you consider what meals to make for the week.

Weekly Meal Planning Tip #1 – Vary Your Animal Protein (If You Eat It)

The key to good health and good meal planning is to eat a variety of foods. If you eat the same foods over and over, you run the risk of getting too much of one thing, while not getting enough of another. For example, red meat is a good source of iron and zinc, but it is also a source of saturated fat and cholesterol. To help you get the nutrients you need, without getting too much of what you don’t, you should be mindful of how much you eat, and how often.  The same is true for most foods. Salmon is another example. It’s a great source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids, but it also contains mercury – a heavy metal that you should limit in your diet. Eating fatty fish twice a week is recommended, but eating salmon every day is not.

When choosing your protein options, select a variety so that you get a wide range of nutrients. It also helps to prevent getting bored of any one particular food. For example, in a 7-day dinner rotation, choose two dinners that include chicken, two that include fish, one that includes beef, one that incorporates pork and one that incorporates turkey. Even better if the family is open to some meatless meals. Incorporating meatless meals, a few times a week, increases the variety of nutrients even more.

Weekly Meal Planning Tip #2 – Vary Your Veggies and Side Dishes

Eating a wide variety of side dishes helps to expand your vitamin and mineral intake even more. Fruits and vegetables come packed with a variety of nutrients just as they are, and they don’t require much effort to get them on your plate.  I highly suggest buying frozen vegetables, and get them in bulk, if you can. That way, if no one is in the mood for the vegetable you had planned to make, you don’t have to worry about it going bad in the refrigerator. You can just leave it in the freezer and make it another day.

I also buy frozen so that it’s easy to make different vegetables for different food preferences. For example, my son’s favorite vegetables are green beans, carrots and corn, but my daughter prefers broccoli and spinach. It’s easy to make two different veggies when you buy them frozen and in bulk. I can just put a serving of each in a microwave safe bowl, cover, cook and serve. Everyone is happy.

The same is true for starchy sides too. Rotate between baked potato, French fries, roasted red potatoes and twice-baked potatoes.  They are all potatoes, but using different preparation methods prevents boredom. All of those options freeze and re-heat well, too. So make extras so you don’t have to cook as much.

Weekly Meal Planning Tip #3 – Keep It Simple

If you love cooking, experimenting with new flavors and preparing new recipes can be fun. But if you’re like me – and you’re over it, don’t feel bad keeping meals simple. Preparing 2-3 meals a day plus snacks, day after day, gets exhausting and time consuming. It can actually take time away from getting outside and exercising, or playing a game with the family. It’s ok to eat tacos twice a week. Trust me – I do it all the time! In fact, if you rotate between fish, beef and chicken tacos, you can have them every day.

I hope this list gives you some ideas on what to make for dinner over the next few weeks. Make extra’s, too. Many of these meals can be heated up for lunch the next day.

WEEK #1 Dinner Ideas

WEEK #2 Dinner Ideas

 As an FYI, all of the dinner ideas that I share in this post incorporate animal proteins. That’s because these are dinners I make for my own family, and we eat animal protein. You can easily substitute plant-based proteins for the options.

 Do you have another simple dinner idea that can be added to the list? Share it in the comments below.