A Great Starting Point
Using theme nights to help you plan out your weekly meals is a smart strategy. It allows flexibility and variety, but gives you enough focus to decide easily on what to eat for the week. Having a theme for every night of the week may be helpful, but even having one or two themes set out each week can be a big help, whether you are cooking, picking up prepared foods, or getting take-out.
We covered the basics of using theme nights and a few category ideas in a previous post, but we are revisiting the topic with ideas of how theme nights can not only help you plan what to cook, but also facilitate some fun family dinners.
Theme to Explore
Dinnertime, although hectic and sometimes frustrating, presents a unique opportunity to connect and communicate with your kids in ways you might not otherwise. Use theme nights to tap into their interests or to complement what they are learning about. Sometimes these topics will fall into a theme night you already use (for example, an interest in Italy falls easily under “Pizza Fridays”), but you can also designate a few nights for special interests.
These “learning and sharing” theme nights may happen only once a week, or once a month, but you’ll be surprised by how easy and fun it is to plan a few meals with your kids if you are figuring it out together. Ask them what they are learning about, what books they are reading, what cultures they would like to know more about, and what kinds of foods they think would go with their interests. The meals you prepare, or pick up, do not need to be complicated. They are a starting point for exploring these interests together, while also providing ideas of what to feed your family that night!
Have fun exploring!
From Kimberly’s kitchen: A few examples theme nights from my family are International Night and Book Night. Here are a few ways we planned for those this past month:
- Australia Dinner – My daughter is learning about Australia at school, so when she started to bring home a few arts and crafts projects that we could use as decorations for a dinner, we began talking about what kinds of foods we could have. I love cooking foods from other cultures, so we usually have a few “International” theme nights a month. This fit in perfectly with that. Granted, our menu was not strictly Australian, but it gave us a chance to talk about it and come up with some fun ideas. So, along with her few crafts, we printed out some pictures that she cut and glued onto a paper “table runner.” Our menu was a salad, shrimp scampi, sautéed vegetables, rice, and some biscuits (cookies) for dessert.
- Olivia the Pig – Both my girls like the Olivia books by Ian Falconer, so recently we chose one of the books to plan our meal around: Olivia Goes To Venice. Naturally, we had an Italian dinner with their stuffed Olivias as additional guests.