Monday Menu takes the guess work out of what to make for dinner by pairing up tasty recipes to create delicious meals your family will love. I also include some of my best strategies for choosing dishes and planning meals to make meal prep quicker, easier and shopping time less hectic.

Put it all to work for your family this week with Baked Ziti, Broccoli Slaw, Steak, Stuffed Sweet Potatoes and Parmesan Brussel Sprout, plus breakfast, snack and dessert recipes!

This Meal Plan’s Secret To Success

Because they share ingredients, these meals are great to make during the same week! Shared ingredients make shopping and meal prep so much easier and is a really smart strategy to keep in mind when planning meals for your family.

For example, buy one pound of bacon and you’ll have an important ingredient for the broccoli slaw, stuffed sweet potatoes and the Brussel sprouts. Cook all the bacon at once, chop it up and put it in a zip top bag, and you’ve saved a huge amount of time in prepping each dish.

To further make the week easy, swap out the walnuts in the broccoli slaw for the pecans included in the sweet potato recipe (or vise versa) and keep the grocery bill down and the pantry organized by only purchasing one kind of nut that you can use in both dishes.

Dessert This Week

This week we’ll satisfy our sweet cravings with Neiman Marcus cookies, a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie with chocolate chunks and pecans. One of the very best cookies you’ll ever eat, it’s name has a great story that makes them the perfect choice for Christmas cookie swaps and gift giving!

Here’s What We’re Snacking On

Full disclosure, I probably be snacking on cookies… but, for those other moments, like when The Engineer needs something to eat while he watches football, we’ll have Air Fryer Natchitoches Meat Pies. This is my handy short cut version of traditional Natchitoches Meat Pies, a Louisiana holiday tradition. My whole family ADORES these little hand pies/empanadas filled with spicy and sausage and beef.

Making Breakfast Easy

Keeping with the holiday spirit, I’ll bake up a batch of gingerbread muffins with bakery style tops and crunchy sparkling sugar! The recipe is easy and warm spices and rich molasses aromas fill our home with all the cozy Christmas smells while they’re in the oven. Tender, moist and just a little bit spicy, they’ll be ready as an easy breakfast on the go or a quiet mid-morning break coffee break.

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