Dinner Meal Plan for Early January
Meal planning is a helpful way to reduce waste and incorporate more sustainable living habits into everyday eating routines. In this Meal Plan series, I share ideas for weekly meal plans for families (loosely based on what my family eats each week) and some related tips to reduce waste around mealtime.
We are far from perfect (whatever that means) when it comes to sustainable eating, so come along while we do our best to navigate and balance busy schedules and lots of extracurricular activities, picky eaters, and more sustainable food options as a family.
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Monday (celebrating a birthday)
- Meatballs in arrabiata sauce
- Popovers
- Salad (spinach, apples, red peppers, carrots, and Brianna’s Asiago Caeser dressing – the best!)
- Lava Cakes
Tuesday
- Beef and broccoli (in the crockpot)
- Rice
Wednesday
- Thai chicken lettuce wraps
- Roasted cauliflower (with olive oil, garlic powder, and parmesan cheese)
- Clementines
Thursday
Friday
- Naan pizzas | Homemade pizzas made on store-bought naan (though this homemade naan is also delicious)
Saturday
- Eat dinner out
Sunday
- Leftovers
Sustainable meal planning tips from this week
- Scheduled a day for leftovers (to be sure they get eaten and not wasted)
- Ordered vegetables from a local food delivery company that offers products from regional farmers, thus helping to reduce food miles and related environmental impacts of transportation
- Rice from a food rescue company (Misfits Market)
- For most of the meals, we chose to make a part of the meal and not the center of the meal, thus stretching a package of meat over several meals instead of just one. We are not vegetarian, but sustainable eating does involve eating less meat to reduce overall demand to a level that can be sustained without exploitative meat production.
- We will compost whatever we don’t eat. We have a compost pick-up service that can take food scraps including meat, dairy, cooked food, and more.
Jen Panaro
Jen Panaro, founder and editor-in-chief of Honestly Modern, is a self-proclaimed composting nerd and advocate for sustainable living for modern families. To find her latest work, subscribe to her newsletter, Stepping Stones.
In her spare time, she’s a serial library book borrower, a messy gardener, and a mom of two boys who spends a lot of time in hockey rinks and on baseball fields.
You can find more of her work at Raising Global Kidizens, an online space to help parents and caregivers raise the next generation of responsible global citizens.
