35 // Simple Meal Ideas for your summer menu
Simple Meal Ideas for your summer menu.
Whether your kids have been out of school for almost a month, or you are just starting your summer, Tuesday is officially to the first day of summer. And with that, I want to make sure that you are thinking of how you can create some easy wins when it comes to meals and specifically dinners this summer.
Because with our schedule, and I know with so many other family schedules, there are a million moving pieces in the summer. No matter how hard we try and establish a routine, things just don't feel as streamlined as they do during the school year. But with this, there's this flexibility and freedom in the summer. The sun is up later and whether your dinner time is the same time every day or gets pushed a little bit later, or you're eating outside, or the kids are playing in the yard while you're preparing dinner, there's this element that we want to enjoy dinner a little bit.
But that doesn't take away the fact that dinner is still work. It's still a job to come up with the menu, to make sure we have the groceries, and to actually prepare the food. That's all in hopes someone will even eat it!
So in this episode, I want to walk you through some really easy weeknight dinner ideas, using ingredients that you already have on hand using a seasonal menu.
You can get my seasonal meal plan here for one that's been done for you. Or tune into this episode for my tips on how to come up with your own rotating meal plan that helps lessen mental fatigue, capitalize on crowd favorites for dinner, and expand on for added variety to ensure easy summer evenings all season long!
Listen to this episode of The Veggies & Virtue Podcast now!
Full Episode Transcription
Please note this a raw transcription. If something doesn’t read correctly, toggle to that timestamp in the show so that you can listen in on what was actually being said!
00:00:00] Mom. Are you struggling with how to feed your kids? Right? Do you wish that there was a way to help your child try new foods? Do you look at a pantry cluttered with pirate, booty and a fridge full of the same foods every week and wonder how you're gonna get your family's meals off the hot mess express.
[00:00:16] I know what it feels like to scroll through all the feeding accounts on Instagram and to see a bunch of Fuji food that my family would never eat. And I too have pinned all the healthy recipes. Good intentions, but zero execution. I understand as a busy mom of three, that it can feel really unattainable, especially on the days when I'm exhausted.
[00:00:34] I have a short fuse and I really just want an easy win to end the day with, well, that's where these meals made. Easy episode ideas come from. With everyday ingredients that you already have on hand, I give you one meal or snack idea a week that's dietician mom approved and is gonna fit in your family's busy life.
[00:00:52] So get ready to press, add to cart and to make meals and snacks easy again, whether your kids have been out of school for almost a month 30, which is crazy to believe, or you are just breaking for summer from a calendar perspective, we are almost officially to the first day of summer. And with that, I want to make sure that you are thinking of how you can create some easy wins when it comes to meals and specifically dinners this summer, because I know with our schedule, and I know with so many other family schedules, there is a Mo million moving pieces in the summer.
[00:01:27] No matter how hard we try and establish a routine, things just don't feel as streamlined as they do during the school year. But in the summer, there's just this flexibility and freedom and the sun is. Later and whether your dinner time is the same time every day, or gets P pushed a little bit later or you're eating outside or the kids are playing in the yard while you're preparing dinner.
[00:01:49] There's this element that we want to enjoy dinner a little bit, but that doesn't. Take away. The fact that dinner is still work. It's still a job to come up with the menu and make sure we have the groceries and to actually prepare the food. And so I wanna walk you through some really easy weeknight dinner ideas, using ingredients that you already have on hand and something I'm working on for you guys.
[00:02:17] This summer is my meal times made easy method course. I am super excited about this. I am busy at work. I have a babysitter coming a few times a week so that I can tackle some time to really pour into this course and really combine the approaches that I've worked with hundreds of families on to create five different phases for you to begin to work through, to make meal planning, meal, prep, and meal.
[00:02:45] Easier on your family. And so while I am working on that this summer, something I want you to begin working on this summer is coming up with a seasonal meal plan, because this is something that I think is super effective and I've offered it in the past and I'm actually going to be. phasing it out. As my meal times made easy course is launched in August.
[00:03:08] And so if you haven't yet ever gotten my seasonal meal plan, I encourage you to do so. I am offering it on a summer sale right now. You don't need any coupon code. You can just go to my site, get the seasonal meal plan. Also link it in the show notes here, and you can download that. And I have done it for fall winter, spring, and summer, and I've shared it for years and years.
[00:03:28] And it's something that I find so functional. And while I'm expanding on that, and I'm including a lot of different approaches that I also encourage families to use when it comes to building really healthy relationships with food. And coming up with healthy ideas for what to offer and how to handle picky eating and all the ins and outs of feeding your family.
[00:03:46] In my course, something that is a super simple, super straightforward strategy that I wanna make sure that you do have access to before I phase it out, is this seasonal meal plan. And to do that, we are gonna get started with thinking about it in the context of summer. From a calendar perspective, summer is beginning and we can look at the calendar and at least the next couple months, depending on how much more of actual summer that you have and begin to create rotations of which rotating meals does your family tend to enjoy.
[00:04:20] And how can you repeat these over the next couple months? So you're not having to come up. A new meal plan each and every week. But instead, so that you begin to categorize the meals that your family really enjoys and then cycle through them while also finding room to have shortcuts. So whether it just be a really fun summer night that you're out doing squirt guns with the kids or a chaotic summer night where you're just getting home late and need dinner on the table.
[00:04:47] 10 minutes ago, you have a plan in place that you can continue to rinse and. Throughout the summer long. So to dive into this again, if you wanna go get my seasonal meal plan, I encourage you to do so while it's on the summer sale and you I'm giving you all four seasons, just so you have them. Lots of my favorite recipes, all the ones that I'm kind of talking about here in terms of what I do are all shared there with recipe links and the spring meal plan might be my favorite, which I'll tease out in a little bit.
[00:05:16] But that one is also included with some really great shortcut meals. So first, if you're thinking about how to come up with your seasonal menu for summertime, I want you to begin to categorize the nights of the week. This doesn't have to be pinned to a night of the week, like taco Tuesday or something like that.
[00:05:33] But I want you to begin to kind of think through first, before you even pin it to a day, think through what menu items does your family tend to like, and in our family, what it looks like for summer is we tend to grill one. That may or may not be seafood, but I try and make sure that we have like a seafood as the main protein, at least one night.
[00:05:55] We always do Mexican of some sort like a taco or something. We always do a pasta in the summer. I find us really enjoying doing like a salad bar night. we always do pizza pretty much every Friday for family movie night. And then one night a week, I just assume I'm taking it off. We're either eating leers or we're gonna, you know, eat out with friends or have a date night and the kids get back to cheese, something like that.
[00:06:17] So when it comes to my summer rotation, I'm categorizing these different seven. Categories. And then I can begin to look at which days make the most sense for which items. And honestly, if you list to my DOI dinner bins, you know, that I may kind of plan taco Tuesday, but it may or may not actually happen on Tuesday, but from a meal planning perspective, in a grocery shopping perspective, rarely does this have to be tied to a specific day, unless there's something highly perishable that you have to eat, you know, by a given date.
[00:06:51] But otherwise you can begin to kind of just look at the course of the week. And I know when I'm making my seasonal meal plan, which is ultimately four weeks worth of menus that I'm gonna continue to repeat month after month for three months. So it's a quarterly meal plan for the season. And yet I really just need to think through what are the categories that I want to repeat week after week.
[00:07:13] And then I can begin to kind of fill in what we might call, like the sales. If you download my quarterly meal plan, this will make a lot of sense. Cuz you'll see the table that I use and I offer you a blank copy. So you can kind of fill out your own. But basically what I want you to think about is if you had a monthly view of a calendar out in front of you, right in the categories across the top for each day of the week.
[00:07:32] And then when you look at the. Need to begin to think about what are your four favorites within that category. If right now you are making the same, let's say five meals every week, which I know is super common for families. Just repeat those, just do the same meal five or all those same five ones plug 'em into which category they go in and repeat them week after week for the month.
[00:07:57] What I encourage you do here though, is to find how you can make a small change from week to. This, I keep talking about tacos. Cause I feel like taco Tuesday is just a well known favorite in many families, but it might be something as simple as every other week we change the shell. So two of the weeks of the month we have country taco shell, two of the weeks of the month, we're having a soft tortilla.
[00:08:18] That could be a big ch shift for kids, depending on your child's level of you know, versatility with different foods and things. But just fill that in because I think even starting with your five given favorite. Plugging them into categories is gonna reduce some of that mental fatigue of coming up with what to make, because you already know.
[00:08:38] But then because it's on paper, you quickly just identify what is one thing I can change in that meal instead of refined beans, can I offer whole black beans instead of cheddar cheese, let's use cold brew, Mexican blend. Instead of avocado, let's do a smashed avocado or make a homemade guacamole and let the kids get involved in.
[00:08:58] so you can make little, little changes, but then over time, as you look at what these four favorites for the season are, it might be something like I'm looking at ours for summer. We have a burrito bowl, grilled fajitos fish tacos, and a taco bar. So now there's a lot more variety, but I can promise you when we started out doing this with my kids, all of whom have been more particular than I would've liked in the eating category.
[00:09:27] it was basically them eating like corn tortilla, chips, and cheese, and maybe some sour cream or, you know, Greek yogurt as my placement replacement for sour cream, each Tuesday. That was what our rotation started looking out like, but eventually I got into the habit of changing one little thing, but begin to plug in what are those four favorites.
[00:09:47] So very quickly you have your whole month's calendar planned out and you know exactly what you want to. , this is where I would turn it into a little bit of a bingo board. And if you have my seasonal meal plan, this will be super straightforward for you to know what I'm talking about here, but make sure that during the week, when you look at the favorites that you've plugged in, that you have varying difficulty because sometimes we can be really ambitious and you may look at this quarterly meal plan that I offer with the recipe links.
[00:10:16] I offer recipe links because even if I. Steamed broccoli. I know a lot of families want a recipe for steamed broccoli. It's not just this like straightforward process. So I've linked a lot of recipes just for your reference. But what I don't want you to think you have to do is have a recipe for every single thing on your menu, because in my home.
[00:10:33] I know that different weeks call for different amount of difficulties. Some weeks I have the capacity to cook every meal from scratch. That is rare though. Most weeks, what I'm doing is, you know, finding a balance between those meals that require a lot of shortcuts and kind of ready, made options that I just have to heat neat and other things that are kind of our go-to classics that I can, you know, pretty effortlessly make because I already am on autopilot and kind of how I know how to prepare it and things like that.
[00:10:59] So you wanna have a balance. when I come to like the bingo board, you wanna kinda have your free space. You want to look at the week and say, is every one of these pretty difficult and like a more demanding meal to make? Or is this one that I could. Simplify somehow. And if you, as I referenced before, if you look at my seasonal meal plan, specifically the rotation for the spring season, I give you a month's worth of my favorite shortcut meals.
[00:11:26] These are the heat meat meals. These are not like you're officially cooking with a recipe. These are like in a assembly order where you're getting the ingredients that you just have to assemble, put together and put out and no cooking is really required. And I live by these. I don't live by them every day of every week, but I live by these staples because we all need shortcuts on hand, whether they're things that we keep in the fridge or in the freezer or in the pantry, depending on if they're nonperishable or not, or if they're just ones that we kind of have on those days that we go grocery shopping and we add into our cart.
[00:11:59] We just know we're gonna need some night off somewhere and we don't know where the hiccup is gonna happen, but we know hiccups are gonna happen because that is motherhood. Then you, you know, kind of put that free space in your week. And so you don't necessarily have to have it set on your seasonal meal plan when that free space is gonna be used, but expect that each week you're probably gonna need a free space.
[00:12:18] So if you don't have a seasonal meal plan set up, I encourage. Snag. The one that I offer that hundreds of families have already used over the years. And it gives you some of my favorite recipes for summer, and it also gives you those shortcut meals that I always have on standby. So make sure that you get that before it is no longer available.
[00:12:39] And of course, as I roll out my meal times made easy method. There will be ideas available to you through that course as well. So even though I'm phasing out the seasonal meal plan, it will be replaced with something much more robust and helpful for you. But knowing that some of you might want something really simple and really cost effective and ready for you right now, as we begin summer.
[00:12:58] Please make sure that you get my seasonal meal plan before it's gone. If these meals made easy ideas are helping you in any way, or this show is encouraging you in the messes. In the meal times of motherhood, I would love to hear about it. All you need to do is scroll down on an apple podcast and tap, write a review.
