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What’s For Dinner Tonight? Something New!

Fill Your Plate

11.04.2011

If you are like us on the Fill Your Plate team, every week when you get ready to go grocery shopping, you think about what you want to cook for dinner each night. And if you are like us, the same 6 or 7 dishes are all that seem to come to mind. Even if you grab a cookbook or go online to search for something new to make, you probably struggle to find something everyone will want to eat. This is the challenge of feeding a family.

When you are trying to account for everyone’s likes and dislikes, it is easy to get stuck in a dinner rut. But branching out and expanding the culinary horizons of your family offers benefits beyond helping ease your boredom at making the same meals again and again. Having a wider range of options and ingredients offers you more flexibility to buy local, buy in season, and stretch your food dollar when food prices fluctuate.

So, how can you break out of that rut without worrying that you will be spending money on food no one will eat? Let Fill Your Plate’s Recipe finder help you locate some new ideas sure to please everyone’s palette. Because the recipe finder lets you look for recipes by ingredient, you can start with something everyone likes and get some great new ideas sure to get your dinner menu out of that rut.

Let’s say everyone in your family likes avocados. A quick search for recipes with avocados on Fill Your Plate reveals several delicious ideas like Golden Beet, Fennel & Avocado Salad, Chicken Breasts with Cheese and Chilies, Avocado and Tomato Salad, and Zesty Papa Protein Scramble. Any one of these might be just the recipe you need to satisfy everyone at your table.

Maybe your family is partial to peppers and a quick review of the ingredients in Sharla’s Arizona Beef & Veggies Stir Fry and Julie’s Oven Roasted Red Potatoes & Asparagus show that both are a good fit for your family.

Get your family involved to increase the likelihood that they will be embrace these new options. Ask each family member to come up with one or two new recipes a month that they want to try. Make finding recipes for new ingredients a game where the winner gets their favorite dessert. Get creative to involve your family in finding new foods and recipes to incorporate into your family mealtimes and in the long run, everybody wins.