How to: Spice up your weeknight dinners

Sometimes I really struggle with the motivation to cook healthy, nutritious, relatively quick-and-easy meals (the kids will eat) during the week.

Sometimes I want to serve up PB-and-Js, mac and cheese, scrambled eggs, or chicken nuggets every night of the week. (Absolutely no judgement if this is what you are doing. I have had weeks where every night the meal came out of a box and all I did was add water. The “vegetable” for the night was a chip that claimed to have vegetables in it. The fruit came out of a can. Nothing wrong with any of this, but I digress.)

Sometimes I want to make a quick run through a drive-thru near me and come home with 10,000 calories of hot, already-cooked food I know the kids will eat.

And then sometimes I decide to really mix it up, which brings us to today’s post!

(Drumroll…..Flashing lights…)

How to spice up your weeknight dinners:

1. Cook a homemade meal, then freeze part of it.
2. Insist that you will certainly not forget what is in that particular container and that you will absolutely 100% be able to tell what the frozen meal is at a later date. And do NOT label it. (This is a vital part of the future fun.)
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 a few times over a few weeks.
4. Pick a day to have (drumroll again….) “Mystery Meal Night” (Lights flash, cheesy game show host announces “Mystery Meal Night” in a deep, calm, yet excited voice.)
5. Now open the freezer and pick an unlabeled container to defrost for dinner.
6. Take bets with your family on what you think is in said container.
7. Look at said container and muse out loud about what light-brown-tan-red-orange-flecks-of-green meal this might be.
8. Write your guesses down. Keep a tally over time of who gets it right most often.
9. Now, defrost and enjoy!

I know. I know. If this is my idea of fun and spicing it up, well… things really have gone downhill. But truthfully my freezer has a few containers in there that I have not labeled. I have absolutely no idea what they are. And while we’re on the topic, why does everything look the same once it is frozen?

So, if I were my own best friend I would tell myself to follow steps #1-9 and have a little fun clearing out the freezer. And then I would buy myself tape and a pen. And I would label every leftover meal that goes into the freezer.

Happy dinner dining!