There are few questions I hear more often in our house than, “What’s for dinner?”
And truthfully, there are plenty of afternoons when I’m asking myself the exact same thing.
I love cooking for my family, but I don’t love making the same decision over and over again every single day. So instead of creating a traditional meal plan where every meal is assigned to a certain day, I put together something a little different for our family this summer.
I’m calling it our Summer House Fare.
It’s a seasonal menu filled with breakfasts, simple suppers, sides, desserts, and drinks that we can choose from throughout the month. Many of the meals use the same basic ingredients, most rely heavily on things I already keep in my pantry, and the rest can easily be picked up during our regular grocery shopping.
So now when I ask my family what sounds good and someone inevitably answers, “Whatever,” I can hand them the menu and say, “Perfect. Pick something.”
And because I planned the menu intentionally, I already know we probably have what we need to make it.
A Meal Plan Without the Rigid Schedule
I’ve never been someone who loves assigning a specific dinner to every night of the week.
Maybe I planned burgers for Thursday, but Thursday turns out to be rainy and cool and spaghetti sounds better. Or maybe it’s 90 degrees outside and nobody wants the meal I had planned that requires turning on the oven.
I’d rather have options.
That’s really what our House Fare is: a guide rather than a schedule.
Our summer menu is filled with meals that make sense for this particular season, and when fall arrives, it can change right along with it.
There’s enough structure that I’m not starting from scratch every afternoon, but enough flexibility that we can still choose what sounds good that day.
I Don’t Cook Dinner Every Night
Despite how much cooking you see me do, I generally only cook a full dinner about three or four nights each week.
When I cook, I intentionally make enough.
Leftovers might become lunch the next day, we might simply have the same dinner again, or I may turn part of one meal into something completely different.
Grilled chicken can become chicken Caesar wraps or chicken bacon ranch flatbreads. Ground beef can become burgers, tacos, spaghetti, or chili. Fresh basil can go onto homemade pizza, into lemon pesto pasta, and over a fresh tomato and mozzarella salad.
Cooking this way keeps me from spending every evening in the kitchen and frees up time for my family, the garden, projects around our home, or simply enjoying a summer evening.
And I think sometimes we need the reminder that feeding our families doesn’t have to be complicated.
We’ve Overcomplicated Food
Somewhere along the way, I think we started believing every dinner needed to be a new recipe.
It doesn’t.
Dinner doesn’t need to be extravagant, complicated, or worthy of a photograph every night.
It needs to be doable, taste good, and feed hungry bellies.
There is nothing wrong with repeating the meals your family loves. There is nothing wrong with leftovers. And there is certainly nothing wrong with eggs and toast when that’s what works.
Simple food made well has fed families for generations.
That’s the kind of cooking I want our House Fare to reflect.
Building a Menu Around What We Already Have
Another thing I considered while putting together our summer menu was ingredient overlap.
I don’t want to buy an ingredient for one recipe, use a small amount, and discover the rest wilted in the refrigerator two weeks later.
Instead, I try to make ingredients work a little harder.
If I’m buying fresh basil, I’ll use it several ways. The same package of bacon can find its way into breakfast hash, BLTs, and chicken bacon ranch flatbreads. Potatoes can become breakfast hash, baked potato chili boats, potato salad, or fries.
A surprising amount of this menu is also made from basic ingredients we already keep around the house: flour, oats, rice, pasta, canned tomatoes, seasonings, eggs, butter, and other everyday staples.
That means I’m not shopping for fourteen completely unrelated dinners.
I’m buying a collection of ingredients that can become many different meals.
The food still feels varied, but the grocery list becomes much simpler.
Eating With the Season
Summer food should feel like summer.
Right now we have tomatoes, corn, peaches, berries, watermelon, cucumbers, herbs, and so many other beautiful ingredients available to us.
They don’t need much fussing.
That’s why this menu includes plenty of grilled meals, fresh produce, simple sandwiches, fruit-filled breakfasts, seasonal cobblers and pies, and sides that make use of what’s growing right now.
Come fall, our House Fare will naturally look different.
That’s part of the beauty of keeping a seasonal menu rather than trying to make one meal plan work all year long.
Our Summer House Fare
Here’s what made it onto our menu this season.
The Early Table
- Dutch Baby
- Breakfast Hash
- Yogurt Bowls
- Eggs, Toast & Breakfast Meat
- Peach Baked Oatmeal
- Biscuits & Sausage Gravy
- Lemon Blueberry Pancakes
- Breakfast Muffins & Sausage Links
Proper Suppers
Our summer dinner menu has a little bit of everything: meals for the grill, familiar family favorites, easy sandwiches, and a few dinners that make especially good use of leftovers.
- Homemade Chicken Patties
- Gourmet Burgers on Brioche Buns
- Homemade Naan Pizza
- Classic Spaghetti Night
- BLTs & Red Beet Eggs
- Street Corn Chicken Bowls
- Chicken Bacon Ranch Flatbreads
- BBQ Chicken Sandwiches
- Chicken Caesar Wraps
- Pittsburgh Sandwiches
- Honey Mustard Chicken Bites
- Grilled Marinated Chicken with Corn & Watermelon
- Baked Potato Chili Boats
- Lemon Pesto Chicken Pasta
- Taco Night
I purposely didn’t choose thirty different dinners.
We don’t need them.
These are meals we enjoy enough to eat more than once, and many can be changed depending on what we have available.
Accompaniments
Instead of assigning a particular side to every dinner, I also created a small collection we can mix and match:
- Tomato, Mozzarella & Basil Salad
- Creamy Potato Salad
- Candied Carrots
- Garlic Butter Broccoli
- Rice Quinoa Pilaf
Afters
Of course, I couldn’t make a House Fare without including a few things for after supper.
- Seasonal Cobbler
- Seasonal Fruit Pie
- Bananas Foster Pudding
- Ice Cream Sundae
- Chocolate Squares with Fruit
I especially love keeping the cobbler and pie simply seasonal. Blueberries one week, peaches another—use whatever is ripe, plentiful, and tastes good.
Sips & Steeps
And finally, a few simple drinks we regularly enjoy at home:
- Lemon Water
- Mint Tea
- Homemade Lemonade
- Homemade Chocolate Milk
- Coffee & Herbal Tea
Make Your Own House Fare
The point isn’t for your family to eat exactly what mine does.
Steal what works and change what doesn’t.
If your family doesn’t like pesto pasta, replace it. If tacos appear on your table every week, keep them on the menu. If you have zucchini coming out of the garden faster than you can use it, build a few meals around zucchini.
The idea is simply to create a collection of meals your family already enjoys, make sure the ingredients overlap wherever possible, and keep enough of those ingredients on hand that choosing dinner becomes easy.
I’m sharing two versions of our Summer House Fare:
Use our finished menu exactly as it is.
Use my design as your starting point and replace the meals with your own family favorites.
A Few Less Decisions Every Day
I’m sure our menu will change a little as we go, and when the seasons change, the House Fare will change right along with them.
But that’s exactly the point.
This isn’t a rigid plan we’re trying to follow perfectly. It’s simply a tool that makes feeding our family a little easier.
Most of what we need is already here. We have plenty of options. And when somebody tells me they don’t care what we have for dinner, I can hand them the menu and tell them to pick something.
Food doesn’t have to be complicated.
Just good food your family enjoys and a few less decisions to make every day.
Many Blessings,
Kelsey
