I Tracked My Family’s Dinners for a Year—Here’s How It Made Weeknights Easier

Last year, I started writing down what we ate for dinner every night, and it completely changed how I meal plan, grocery shop, and cook. I’ve been meal planning for about 13 years (since my oldest was a baby), and I’ve had different routines over that time.

Some years, our meal plans were scratched on the back of the grocery list; other times, they lived in my calendar or planner. Later, we added a magnetic dry-erase board in our kitchen so I could stop answering "What's for dinner?” three times a day.

A few years ago, I really dialed in my system and started using a shared family note on my phone as well as a loose plan on the dry-erase board. However, this only showed me what we planned to eat, not what we actually ate each week.

The reality of meal planning is that your plan will change. It's bound to happen! Sometimes you forget to thaw the ground beef, your partner is stuck at work, or a kid forgot they had a project due tomorrow. Tracking what we really eat for dinner every night, like I do now, has made me a better planner and, luckily, helped save money on groceries.

How Tracking My Family’s Dinners Helps Meal Planning

My tracking system started with a dinner diary in this fancy, dated planner. I was using the daily pages for drawings or writing out personal thoughts (affectionately known as my food and feelings journal), and realized I could use the monthly pages to note what we ate for dinner each night.

Some weeks, I made notes right after the kitchen was cleaned, but I often caught up in my dinner diary at the end of each week. While my meal plan might have said chicken schnitzel with arugula salad, what I wrote in my planner, one-pan beef and broccoli, reflected how the plan had changed. 

After a few months of tracking dinners this way, I learned that I often over-bought on aspirational dinners and under-bought for shortcut pantry meals that we ate a lot. This allowed me to stock up on staples from Aldi and Costco to keep in the pantry and freezer and plan fun cooking projects for when we had more time. It also cut down on food waste.

Documenting dinner also helped me meal plan faster. I found trends in what we ate most in certain seasons, and I made a list of dinner hits. This list of favorite recipes meant I didn’t have to pull a brand-new dish out of thin air for each night of the week, a huge lift off the mental work of dinner planning. And my husband could access the list to help him plan meals as well. 

Tracking and repeating dinners made me a better cook, too. When you cook the same shortcut lasagna a few times, you learn which ingredient will make the flavor even better and dial it up to a million-dollar recipe.

Most importantly, tracking dinners reminded me that repeating dinners by making a list of favorites does more than just save time and money—it creates meal memories for our family.