How to Do Large Family Meal Planning in the Summer

Dinner plans

The first thing we're doing this month is a grilled pork chop. 

I made teriyaki pork chops last month. We always do Alfredo at least once a month. I like to do carbonara in the summer because it's a light dish, but it's still pasta. It's not quite a pasta salad. We're going to break up the BLTs this month as well. Great easy meal. We're going to do some meatball subs this month in the summertime.

I love to make sure that we have a lot of grilling options. I love to make sure we have many sandwiches or wraps. Just light, easy meals for the summertime that we can pair well with whatever vegetables are coming out of the garden at the time. So that's kind of the overall plan. 

From now until the weather cools off in the fall, we're going to do power bowls. I wanted to have some really easy meals that I could have prepped and put in the fridge for those busy garden days or maybe a day when we know we want to do some activities with the kids.

We're also going to do stuffed shells this month. This is a meal I think I'm going to make twice this month. For leftovers, we're going to make honey soy chicken. 

Preparing ahead of time

I have a couple of different meats that I want to marinate this month. I'm going to take a day sometime after I go grocery shopping and just marinate all my meat at once, get it all in the freezer, and then that way, when we want to have those for dinner or even a lunch, possibly, I can pull them out, and they're kind of ready to go. 

We have a lot of barbecues going on in the summertime that kind of started last month. 

So we'll plan meals, but sometimes we're not always home for them. Some things just get skipped over, and that's okay. I'll push them over to the next month. 

I also take time, just a day, to prepare a ton of feta burgers and get them in the freezer. I am going to make chicken pizza this month. That's grilled chicken that we top with marinara sauce, a little cheese, and a little pepperoni. It's great.

We're also going to do loaded subs. We're also going to do fajitas. That's a great family summer meal that we love. We're also going to do cheesesteaks, which are just the same ingredients for fajitas and different seasonings. So that's how I like to make my grocery budget stretch further using the same ingredients but for different meals. 

More quick and easy dinners

We're going to do a shrimp boil packet.

I've never done those before, but I think I will wrap everything in tin foil, put it on the grill, and hopefully, those go well. We're going to do nachos, a really quick, easy meal with minimal cleanup. We're going to do a chicken broccoli and rice casserole. Lots of leftovers with this meal, and everybody likes it.

We're going to make taquitos. Probably chicken taquitos, but we'll see. We're going to do a pasta salad with some sort of grilled hot dog, whether that be chili cheese dogs or whatever. We'll also have some sort of pasta salad going down this month. We're going to do teriyaki chicken wraps. 

This month we're going to do a honey mustard pork chop. Lots of pork chops in the freezer, so we love to use those on the grill during the summertime, so we're going to do that this month. We're going to eat leftovers twice.

My husband and I have a date night this month, plus it is my birthday this month, my husband's birthday this month, my father-in-law's birthday this month, and Father's Day. So that's kind of like all of those last-minute things towards the end of the meal plan, but they are sprinkled throughout the month, so we might eat out those nights. I leave those meals open, and we'll see what we want. 

That's the entire dinner meal plan, just super quick, spitting it out for the month of June.

Lunch plans

What I did for lunches this summer is the same thing I did last year. I just make a list of roughly seven to ten meals that we'll eat throughout the week, every week for the summer, and then I'll switch it maybe next month if the kids don't like a meal or something. 

So for lunches, we will have roll-ups, just lunch meat and cheese wrapped in a tortilla. My kids love them. Homemade pizzas, homemade Lunchables, or we're going to do mac and cheese. I'll pick up some boxed mac and cheese from Aldi or something. We'll do those once a week—grilled cheese with tomato soup or just grilled cheese that's always a huge hit here. 

Quesadillas. You could do just cheese. You could take leftover proteins from the night before, whether chicken, steak, or whatever you have, and throw those in your quesadillas. I am going to buy a box of corn dogs this month.

Of course, hot dogs, either throwing in our mac and cheese or maybe something like that. We're also going to do fish sticks. My kid's favorite summer lunches are fish sticks, mac and cheese, and applesauce. So those are just a few meals we could have for lunches throughout the month while the kids are home. That might change and evolve as summer goes on. 

How to do large family meal planning for summer

How do you do large family meal planning? Will you include lunches throughout the summer? Share your ideas and plans in the comments below.