The Secret to Low-Stress Weeknight Dinners
recipes are for weekends, and 11 other family dinner lessons...
Weeknight dinners. They loom, inevitable and imposing, the Mount Everest to climb at the end of long days.
Simply skip it? Impossible, when you’re responsible for the care and feeding of a family! And I don’t want to skip dinner: I love food. I enjoy cooking and I want to feed my family nourishing meals. Plus, I crave the comfort of something good to eat at the end of each day.
But when my husband or kids innocently ask, “What’s for dinner tonight?” I regularly experience feelings that, if acted upon, could get me jailed for life.
In a beloved fantasy, I live in Downton Abbey, where a highly trained staff presents my family with a delicious meal each evening. We dine at a table adorned with fresh flowers, flickering candles, and gleaming silver. We enjoy our dinner while using perfect table manners and engaging in scintillating conversation, and graciously thank the capable staff, who expertly clean up.
Lacking a trust fund and servants, over the past two decades I’ve been charged with feeding a family, I’ve tried a million solutions to the “what’s for dinner?” problem: exclusively serving prepared foods, using a meal delivery service, eating at restaurants, ordering takeout, batch-cooking meals on weekends, elaborate meal plans, and weekly theme nights.
I’ve looked for salvation in “delicious 15-minute” recipes and bought every “easy weeknight dinner” cookbook I could find.
I’ve approached weeknight dinners casually, like something I could pull together breezily at the last minute, without any prior thought: this resulted in random, unsatisfying meals.
I’ve complained loudly to anyone who would listen about the burden of weeknight dinners and the attendant mental load. This paid off: my husband assumed primary responsibility for the grocery shopping and dishwashing.
But none of it helped abate the mental anguish that thinking about, planning for, and executing weeknight dinners caused me until a recent evening when everything changed. I think of it as my Game-Changing Dinner Revelation…
Like most of history’s momentous epiphanies, this one occurred on an ordinary Tuesday. I was leaning against our kitchen counter, poring over yet another “easy” recipe, when I realized I was missing a critical ingredient. As I mentally debated how to salvage the meal while suppressing my red-hot rage, a voice in my head whispered, maybe it’s time to give up using recipes on weeknights! I stood up a little straighter and considered this thought. The voice chimed in again, louder now, maybe it’s time to set some weeknight dinner rules that work for you…
Much of my suffering over weeknight dinners, I realized in a flash, was caused by lofty and unrealistic expectations, many of which I’d absorbed from the culture around me. I had placed dinner on a pedestal, expecting it to be special, exciting, filled with variety, and a pleasure for every family member.
It was time to start thinking about weeknight dinners differently—and to set my own rules based on what’s important to me: meals that are healthy, mostly home-made, that I enjoy, and that require minimal time and mental load. Here they are…
12 Rules for Weeknight Dinner Happiness
Dinner is a fact of life. There’s no point arguing with reality. Much of my angst was caused by wishing and hoping someone or something would magically solve the dinner problem. It’s a relief to accept that dinner is inevitable and requires work.
You make the rules! If you’re in charge of dinner, you decide whether it’s hot, cold, homemade, store-bought, elaborate, or simple, whether each family member is served the same thing, and how much variety you want to include. It’s your kitchen, your family, your time, and your dinner!
Delegate like a CEO. Weeknight dinner planning and preparation is a complex, multi-step operation. When you’re in charge, you’re empowered to delegate discrete functions to others (for example, grocery shopping, chopping, peeling, dishwashing, and table-setting) without micromanaging their execution.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Setting aside time each week to check the calendar and write down a meal plan, along with a grocery list, is time very well spent. Having a weekly plan also means that grocery shopping can be confined to just one trip.
Eat what you love. Learn how to make your favorite meals and serve them. What do you love ordering at restaurants? Teach yourself to make that and memorize it, so you have something to look forward to at the end of tiring days. Since childhood, I’ve been obsessed with crispy skinned chicken thighs and I use the technique in this recipe every week.
Variety is overrated. Many people, especially children, like to eat the same things repeatedly. Most nights, I serve individual pieces of chicken, fish, or meat, baked in the oven, grilled, or cooked in a cast-iron skillet, with a vegetable (or fruit!) side.
Recipes are for weekends. Relying on a repertoire of techniques is for weekdays. Not relying on recipes to make dinner frees up an enormous amount of mental energy. You don’t need to check amounts, cook-time, or ingredients, and you can write a grocery list without consulting multiple recipes/cookbooks. I love experimenting with new recipes and dishes, but I confine these projects to weekends, when I have more time and mental energy.
Develop a signature house style. When you stick to one style, you become an expert at those dishes, and you’ll remember to keep the relevant garnishes and ingredients on hand. My favorite foods are Mediterranean-inspired—consequently, our kitchen is always stocked with olive oil, white and red wine vinegar, garlic, oregano, olives, lemon, salt, and pepper.
Assign a time limit. I allocate one hour per day for making and eating dinner, and I put it on my calendar. This helps me put the effort involved in dinner in proper perspective. When I return to old habits and begin thinking murderous thoughts, I remind myself that my daily dinner time expenditure is just one hour.
Find a perma-side. To address the needs of picky eaters, it's helpful to locate a low-maintenance side dish that everyone will always eat. In our house, it’s steamed rice, which I use our trusty rice cooker to make.
Fruit is a dinner food. Many kids dislike the texture of cooked vegetables. No problem! Simply serve raw carrots, cucumbers, grape tomatoes, or celery. And if your kids don’t like vegetables at all, serve fresh fruit.
Complaints must be made in writing. Let any family member who is old enough to voice an opinion know they may outline their concerns in a handwritten letter mailed to this address: Weeknight Dinner Issues, 123 Kitchen Road, North Pole, 88888. Kids may be interested to know that this happens to be next door to Santa’s workshop!
How do you feel about weeknight dinners?
Do you love, hate, outsource?! Do you have your own set of rules? I’d love to hear your go-to hacks for making weeknight dinners easier!
With Mother’s Day approaching, many of us have gifts on our minds, and I’d love to provide helpful suggestions in next week’s issue!
If you’re a mother or grandmother, please fill out this anonymous form (or hit reply to this email!) and tell me what you’d most like on May 11.
How to Be the Happiest Mother on the Block. Good mother vs. should mother.
Books with Benefits. Turning a house into a home, delicious true tales, and delving inside the minds of famous women...
How to Make New Friends in Adulthood. 7 proven strategies, plus the eye-opening number of hours it takes!
Here are some of my most-used kitchen tools:
I use this workhorse cast iron skillet every day, plus these splatter screens that prevent hot oil spits and mess.
This is the rice cooker I swear by (and it’s on sale right now!)
An indispensable lemon squeezer—I use it for limes, too.
The comments on last week’s issue on your comfort go-tos were lovely, inspiring, and filled with great book and TV show recommendations! Here are some of my favorites:
Cassie said, “My real-life happy place was the town I went to college in and then lived in for the 3 years after I graduated. It's where I had my first apartment where I lived alone. My first job. So many fond memories of becoming myself there. I miss it every day (even though it had brutal winters!)”
Marcia said, “My comfort reads are Irish fiction, particularly Maeve Binchy, something I can sink into for a week, and know that at the end everything resolves in a real-world way.”
Ginny made a very good point about commemorating my celebrity encounter(!), “How refreshing to hear a celebrity pumping up regular old goodness. And to have Tina Fey’s fingerprints on your purse. Put that puppy behind glass, stat!”
If you enjoy Happy on Purpose, there are several ways to let me know: click the ❤️ button at the top or bottom of this email, leave a comment, upgrade to a Paid Subscription, share it with someone else, or hit reply and email me! I reply to every message and comment!
I’ll be back next week! xo Amelia
RICE COOKERS UNITE
I think my success/happiness as a mom began when I realized that chicken nachos can be for dinner.