Dietitian Jenn

I want to give you a permission slip for the nights when you’re running on fumes:

You don’t need a perfect dinner.
You need a minimum viable dinner. 😅

Here’s the checklist I use:

✅ Protein (beans, eggs, tofu, yogurt, cheese, lentils…)
✅ Produce (fresh, frozen, canned, bagged salad—whatever is realistic)
✅ Something filling (bread, rice, pasta, tortillas, potatoes… even cereal)

That’s it. If you’ve got those three, dinner counts.

This is also a lifesaver in multivore families: you can keep the base vegetarian and make meat an optional add-on for anyone who wants it; without turning yourself into a short-order cook.

Tell me, what’s your go-to “minimum viable dinner” when you cannot stand the idea of cooking? 👇💬

Dinner isn’t hard because you “don’t have it together.”
Dinner is hard because it’s basically a tiny project management job… every single day.

It’s not just cooking. It’s deciding what to cook when you’re tired, everyone has opinions, someone is suddenly “starving,” and the fridge is full of ingredients that don’t quite make a meal. (Why is it always like this at 5:12? 😅)

It’s also the invisible stuff: keeping inventory in your head, remembering what got used up, noticing what’s about to go bad, planning around schedules and preferences, managing leftovers, and trying to make it work in a multivore house without making two separate dinners.

And then there’s the extra layer: the pressure that dinner needs to look a certain way to “count” as healthy. Wellness culture has a lot of opinions for people who aren’t the ones doing the cooking.

Sometimes the best move is to lower the bar and feed people something, without turning it into a character assessment.

If dinner feels heavier than it “should,” you’re not failing. You’re carrying a lot.

Tell me: what’s the hardest part for you right now: planning, shopping, cooking, cleanup… or just the constant deciding? 💬