Themed Weekly Dinners

I love cooking for my family, but like any stay-at-home mom meal planning/cooking can get tedious and it is the last thing I want to do.  Over the years I have tried many ways to make it easier and more exciting for me, which in turn makes it more exciting for the people I'm cooking for.

During this 2020 Quarantine it has been even more challenging.  With limited stock at the grocery stores and with staying in or below budget more important than ever I was definitely put to the test.  I started watching every episode of Tasty Producer Rie's Make It Fancy in hopes of being inspired.  While I didn't recreate any of her recipes I did work on my own Make It Fancy recipes mostly using Hamburger/Chicken/Tuna Helper and Rice-a-Roni mixes.  According to my family I really made Hamburger Helper fancy and by including a lot of add-ins and a side salad I was able to make a very yummy and inexpensive dinner.

Another thing I thought would help me to not get bored with meal planning and cooking was to come up with some Themed Weekly Dinner ideas.   I started by going through my cookbooks and figured I could do meals for a week from just one cookbook.  For example I have the Ratatouille cookbook so I thought that could be a theme week.  I'll only do recipes out of the book and we can watch the movie on the first night.

Some of the other cookbooks I have are:

I love collecting pop culture themed cookbooks!

I have a lot of other ideas as well.  Just a few are Disney Theme Park Copycat Week, Restaurant Inspired Meals, Pixar Week, 2 different Disney Movie Weeks, and Literary Author Week.

Beginning tomorrow we will be enjoying our first of two Disney Movie Weeks.  The films that will be featured are Lady & the Tramp, Beauty & the Beast, The Emperor's New Groove, Brave, Alice in Wonderland and The Incredibles.

Father's Day will kick off with Brave.  I hope you'll join us.