THE NO-DECISION MENU
Remove food decisions from your week
These are default recipes you can plug into your schedule.
I created these so you don’t have to think about it.
Breakfast:
Baked Blueberry Oatmeal — Make a batch Sunday, eat it all week. Swap berries or nuts to change it up.
4 Servings
Ingredients
4 cups old-fashioned oats
4 cups milk
2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen)
1/4 cup maple syrup or honey
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
1 TBSP Butter
Instructions
Heat oven to 375°F. Grease an 8x8 baking dish.
Whisk milk, syrup, and vanilla in a bowl.
Stir in oats, baking powder, and salt. Fold in berries.
Pour into the dish, bake 35–40 min until set.
Cut into squares. Fridge up to 5 days. Reheat or eat cold.
Lunch:
Ground Turkey Bowl — Your "Chipotle at home." Never gets old. Swap the grain, protein, or beans. Makes easy leftovers.
4 Servings
Ingredients
1 lb ground turkey
1 packet taco seasoning (or 1 tbsp chili powder + 1 tsp cumin + 1/2 tsp garlic powder + salt)
4 cups cooked rice (or whatever grain)
1 can black beans, drained
toppings: shredded cheese, salsa, avocado, whatever's in the fridge
Instructions
Brown the turkey in a skillet over medium heat, breaking it up, ~6–8 min.
Add seasoning + 1/3 cup water, simmer 3–4 min until thickened.
Warm the beans.
Build bowls: rice, turkey, beans, toppings.
Dinner:
Sheet Pan Chicken & Sweet Potato — About as easy as a weeknight gets. Make extra portions to freeze for the "I just don't have time" nights.
2 Servings
Ingredients
1 lb chicken thighs or breast, cut into chunks
2 medium sweet potatoes, diced
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp paprika, 1 tsp garlic powder, salt + pepper
any sturdy veg you have (broccoli, peppers, onion)
Instructions
Heat oven to 425°F. Line a sheet pan.
Toss chicken, sweet potato, and veg with oil and seasoning right on the pan.
Spread in one layer. Roast 25–30 min, flipping once, until chicken hits 165°F.
Freeze leftover portions labeled with the date — straight into your FIFO rotation.
THE SYSTEM
The 10-minute Sunday system that kills “what’s for dinner?” for the whole week
I fixed “what’s for dinner?” the hard way — by planning over 300,000 meals in the Coast Guard, in conditions where there was no room to wing it. The lessons stuck. I still run them in my own kitchen for a household of two, because there’s nothing worse than walking in after a day of a few hundred micro-decisions, opening the fridge to nothing, and facing that question with an empty tank.
But here’s the thing, a plan for your weeknights shouldn’t take much thought — if you’re running a system that’s simple, proven, and repeatable. It takes about 10 minutes on Sunday. And no, you don’t need to be a chef.
Here are the three parts you can put into action this week:
1. Theme nights
You probably already do a version of this. Taco Tuesday is a theme night. Mine just go deeper and are built to repeat. In the Coast Guard we ran them constantly.
Fish Friday gave the crew something to look forward to underway, sometimes surf-and-turf, sometimes fried cod. The point isn’t to make what you eat boring — it’s to make the planning behind it boring, repeatable, and simple.
In my house it’s Marinara Monday, 99% of Mondays. Some weeks that’s dry pasta and jarred sauce; other weeks it’s baked ziti or lemon garlic pasta. Same category, zero decision.
Do this week: Pick one theme night. Write down a go-to dish you can make without a recipe, plus the ingredients you need. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it. One is a fine start. You can add more as you get comfortable.
2. Cook once, eat twice (and freeze the rest)
Pick one night a week where you always make an extra serving or more. Mine’s usually Thursday. Stir-fry night.
Instead of saving the extra as tomorrow’s lunch, put it in a container, label it with the date and name, and put it in the freezer. Do it every week. It builds up fast.
This is what saves you on the chaos night. No groceries, no time to think, and no urge to drop $50 on DoorDash. And when you pull from the freezer, run FIFO: First In, First Out. New food goes to the back, old food comes out the front. Always rotate. Read exactly how I use the freezer as a meal planning system here.
Do this week: Make one extra serving on one night. Label it, date it, freeze it.
3. Plan to eat out — on purpose
Plan one meal out per week, in advance. Restaurant, takeout, delivery. It doesn’t matter.
When you plan it, you’re ten times more likely to pick something reasonable than when you’re ad-hoc, exhausted, and ordering the greasiest thing on the app. My wife and I do sushi most Wednesdays. It’s a solid hump-day meal we look forward to.
Do this week: Pick the night and the place now, before the week starts.
Put those together and your week is mostly built: three theme nights, one freezer meal, one planned meal out. Five to ten minutes on Sunday and the whole week is decided.
BEFORE YOU GO: HERE’S HOW I CAN HELP…
1) Plan Your Week of Dinners in 60 Seconds (for only $9) — You already made 100 decisions today. The 101st doesn’t have to be “What’s for Dinner?”.
2) YouTube — Binge my best content on how to reduce decision fatigue with a simple meal planning system.
Your Saturday system reset, same time next week.
— Steven
