Last January, I was at my wit's end. One of our children was going through a stage of very picky eating. After laboring over family meals, it was discouraging to spend dinner time fielding complaints and bargaining over how much of the meal needed to be eaten.
Inspired by Kendra Adachi's book The Lazy Genius Kitchen, I decided to simplify our menu to reduce my workload and provide meals that had a higher approval rating with the picky eater.
I started by naming what was important (as the book directed). My priorities for meals were:
1- Healthy (high protein, clean ingredients, made from scratch)
2- Family approved (by at least 4/5 family members)
3- Relatively foolproof (no specialty ingredients and won't burn or flop if I'm distracted)
I narrowed our recipes down to the meals that met that criteria for this season of life.
Then I organized them in a "meal matrix" (Kendra's idea) with a different category of recipe for each day of the week. For example, Monday is soup and Tuesday is Mexican.
Now all I have to do on a weekly basis is pick from 4-6 recipes for each day of the week. I also have a list of easy veggie sides if a meal needs a side.
Meal planning now takes me less than 10 minutes each week and the meals are received with less complaining and more excitement.
Here is our meal matrix with clickable recipe links included!
If you found this helpful I would love to hear from you. You can email me or leave a comment on this post. For more "lazy genius" ideas like this, I recommend Kenda Adachi's book The Lazy Genius Kitchen!