Easily Add More Variety Into Your Meal (with examples!)

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Today is all about how to get out of your food rut. No more food ruts happening here! I’ll teach you how to easily and simply add more variety into your meals. And importantly, making sure it doesn’t feel like we’re eating the same exact meals over and over again.

Feeling like you’re in a food rut?
How to easily add more variety into your meals
How to add variety to spaghetti
How to add variety to taco night
How to add variety to meatballs
Looking for more resources to help with meal planning and feeding your family? Check out these posts:

Feeling like you’re in a food rut?

I have loved sharing all my meal planning tips. Last week we chatted about strategies for dealing with pickiness in the house – picky kids, picky husband… maybe a picky self? Let’s move on to how to easily add more variety that doesn’t feel intimidating!

Maybe it sounds familiar… you have spaghetti every Monday. Then the same tacos every Tuesday. You’re making baked chicken with green beans and mashed potatoes on Wednesday. And the repeated meals continue to happen week after week.

And these may be delicious! You could also be loooooving them for quite a long time. But eventually, maybe you notice that you start to feel bored with what you’re eating. You might be feeling ready for something different, but there is some fear around it.

You worry that no one is going to like it if you change it up. Or you might be worried that it may be too much work. Does any of this sound familiar?

How to easily add more variety into your meals

Here’s how we can simply add more variety into meals.

If you love a dinner theme, like pasta on Monday or tacos on Tuesday, let’s think about how we can add a little more variety to that meal that is already happening.

How to add variety to spaghetti

Let’s talk about how to add variety into a spaghetti dish.

Instead of using a spaghetti noodle, change the pasta shape.
If you typically use ground beef in the sauce, try ground turkey.
Or use a different pasta.
Or add some sautéed kale in with the sauce.

You start with the same base meal, but add a tiny tweaks into the meal. This keeps it very familiar, but slowly adds more variety into the meal.

And you don’t have to think about changing the whole thing! We’re just picking one thing to change and mixing it up.

How to add variety to taco night

Taco night is full of endless possibilities!

An easy way to change up your taco is to use a big burrito style tortilla, or hard shells or small corn tortillas.
Or nix the tortilla and make burrito bowls over a bowl of rice.
Or you turn it into a salad. Everything else stays the same, but you simply serve it over a bed of lettuce.
We can also change up our toppings. Maybe instead of going for a lettuce and tomato combo, maybe you make a cabbage slaw served with avocado (yum yum!).
Maybe instead of beef you use salmon, ground turkey or beans to change the protein.

There are so many ways we can begin to add more variety into our taco meal.

How to add variety to meatballs

Let’s chat meatballs, because they are really great for utilizing this strategy of changing up one part of the meal.

Lately I’ve been making a lot of turkey zucchini meatballs. I had ground beef on hand so I kept everything exactly the same in that recipe, but just changed the ground turkey out for ground beef.
The next week I added BBQ sauce and changed the flavor up that way.
Then the week after I used ground chicken and added some extra dried herbs into the mix. It changed the flavor a little bit, but the base recipe was still the same.

And the beautiful thing was that I didn’t have to give it a ton of thought when I had a ground meat on hand. I know we love meatballs, so starting with a base recipe and changing just one part of it kept it simple.

This strategy allows us to easily mix it up and not have the same meal over and over again.

I hope that this has sparked ideas for your own meal planning! Are you already thinking about a meal that you can change up? I’d love to hear about it!