How Maria Montessori Simplified our Family Dinner Routine

My husband shops, I cook, and our toddler helps with both. Up until recently, our dinner process was that my husband and son would grocery shop on Saturday or Sunday, and call me on their way home from school every weekday to ask, “what’s the plan for dinner?” Having little sense of what they’d purchased on their last shopping trip, I would name something that sounded good, for which we would then need to place an order or buy ingredients. The ensuing scramble brought a lot more stress into our busy lives and wasted resources on extra shopping trips or takeout. At the end of the week, we would compost half a fridge’s worth of food that never made its way into a meal. Our “process” had plenty of room for improvement. 

It wasn‘t until my second maternity leave that I finally sat down to devise a better system. I wanted to create a practical and foolproof approach that would give my husband and toddler a role in meal selection without requiring me to try new recipes after long workdays. I landed on an plan that gave them meal choices I had preselected, within a framework that consumed our most perishable grocery items early in the week, ensured a somewhat balanced diet (still a little heavy on cheese tbh), and reduced waste by making shopping trips more intentional and by including a late-week meal that utilized fridge leftovers. 

The system relies on a table and two lists. 

 In the table: 

·       Column 1 contains days of the week. 

·       Column 2 notes the theme of the day (Monday is fish, Tuesday is chicken, Wednesday is pasta or pizza, Thursday is a grain dish (usually a hearty veggie risotto or paella), Friday is fondue (this is how we go through fridge leftovers), Saturday is eat out or takeout, and Sunday is a wild card based on the day’s purchases). 

·       Column 3 contains three menu options for each day/theme (e.g. Monday can be fish tacos, baked Mediterranean cod, or Niçoise salad). We update these as often as we need a change.

Column 4 lists the specialty ingredients needed for each of those three menu options. 

Columns 3 and 4 are where I think Maria (can I call her Maria?) would be most proud. The menu options in Column 3 enable my husband to host an exciting conversation with our toddler, in which he has the freedom to choose what he wants to eat within preset limits. Column 4 draws them further into the process with a grocery store scavenger hunt and gives our toddler a deeper sense of pride and ownership around each meal.

Back at home, he often helps prep the food and set the table, as well. Having three different color napkins has been a very engaging initiator

“Gee, I keep thinking about which color napkins we should use to set the table. Can you help?” 

Since involving him in this way, our dinner discussions evolved from a tense, “food stays on the table!” to a conversational, “I love the napkins you selected. Did you have to search hard to find carrots in the store?” 

The two lists.

These are more straightforward because they support breakfasts and lunches, which don’t change. The optionality for these meals is just the order in which we eat our seven weekly options. 

·       List 1 is for my husband to use at the store in addition to the list generated by his menu selections, and contains all perishable items needed for breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. I copied our friend Lee and bought him CapaBunga’s grocery tote. He’s proudly the coolest and most organized shopper in the store (other than Lee).

·       List 2 is my responsibility and includes all non-perishable pantry staples that support breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and all dinner menu options. These are all available online and my best kept secret is Terramar Imports, while Thrive Market fills in the gaps and Rancho Gordo provides a huge number of the beans and grains, all of which are heirloom. 

It’s worth mentioning my other secret weapon in all this: the Paprika app. Working on both my phone and iPad, this app has been a game-changer for organizing my recipe options, because it cuts through all the unnecessary details and perfectly imports JUST the recipe from any online source. I can then edit it to make it more intuitive (e.g., a paragraph about how to sauté onions becomes “sauté onions”), to organize the recipes, and to plan meals in multiple ways. 

This whole system might sound complicated at first and honestly, I didn’t know if it would work for us. In part because it required my husband and I to share a quiet moment in which I could explain the “rules”, and in other part because we still liked to believe that we are culinary adventurers with unpredictable palettes. But it turns out that when you find some good recipes, you don’t mind eating them once every one, two, or three weeks. And if we get completely sick of one dish, I just tweak the table a little to replace it.

And it also turns out that with two kids under three, a puppy, a house under construction, and three jobs between us, a little predictability was exactly what we needed. Not only did this allow us to move through a once stressful part of the day on autopilot, it engaged our toddler in a way that made mealtime more enjoyable. There’s been less spoiled food going into our compost, and we shop and order-in less frequently, reducing our carbon footprint and saving time. 

Building this system was a heavy lift in the beginning, but the return on investment has been significant. I welcome you to plug in some menu options of your own and try it.