5 tricks for escaping the boring-dinner rut

Everyone's been there: It’s 4:30pm, and you have no idea what you’re making for dinner. (Do you really have to think of this every day for the rest of your life?!) Or you have a meal plan and all of the ingredients…but the dish couldn’t seem less appetizing. Enter the dinner doldrums. They can strike at any time, but they always seem to set in when you’re trying to cook in a more nutritious way. It’s almost like you narrow your ingredients and recipes down so much that you’re left with no appealing options.

But following the Weight Watchers program doesn’t have to mean preparing the same chicken and salad for dinner every night. In fact, it shouldn’t! Boredom leads to getting off-track: If you’re not enjoying eating, you might seek higher-Points foods as a quick fix, like that “screw it” moment where you just give up on cooking a healthy meal and order pizza.

Ready to add some excitement back into your evening meals? Check out our top tips and recipes for healthy recipes that take something familiar and tweak them, so dinner feels new enough to be interesting — yet still manageable.

Many people don’t feel comfortable experimenting with the main protein of the meal — meat tends to be expensive, and you may worry about under- or overcooking it if you’re not an experienced cook. Sides, however, are a great thing to get creative with. So keep your main protein simple and within your comfort zone (your usual grilled pork or store-bought rotisserie chicken) and have fun with the side dish. Your go-to protein will feel way more exciting when it’s not served with the same ol’ veggies.

Look, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Break your typical dish down to its elements and change only one (or maybe two) ingredients to freshen up the flavor. For example, if your go-to is ground beef tacos, you don’t need to try a 20-ingredient chicken mole. Instead, swap out the ground beef with taco seasoning for ground turkey simmered in green salsa. Or try corn tortillas instead of flour tortillas. Or top them with a yogurt-based crema instead of guac. Start with one change, and next time you can build from there.

Using the same ingredients as usual but changing the way you cook them can make a dish feel really different. That’s because different cooking methods lead to different textures and flavors (but doesn’t change the end result so much that your family’s picky eaters will think the meal is too out-there). For example, grilling chicken Parm versus the usual frying adds char and smokiness from the grill. Or roasting cauliflower instead of sauteeing it can make it crispy and caramelized.

Consider these the food version of pop song mash-ups: taking two familiar favorites and making something new by combining them. Start with something you and your family already know and love (cheeseburgers) and change the form to…taquitos or a salad bowl! If you make pizza often, change the form to…pot pie! This adds enough of a twist that it feels different, but the flavors still taste familiar.

Who decides what dinner has to be? We’re accustomed to ending our day with meat and sides or a bowl of pasta, but thinking outside the box presents tons of new dinner options. There are lots of untraditional ways to get a well-rounded meal with protein and fiber. Think breakfast for dinner. Anything on toast. A savory yogurt bowl with lox, capers, red onion, and everything bagel seasoning and loads of fresh veggies for crunch — like radish and cucumber. A savory oatmeal bowl with deli turkey, shredded cheese, fresh tomatoes, and slices of avocado. We also firmly believe that assembling is cooking, and you can make a great snack spread for dinner, featuring things like vegetable sticks and tzatziki, cheese and crackers, hardboiled eggs, olives, hummus, sweet peppers, cheese, deli turkey, pita chips, you get the idea.

We all get what’s-for-dinner fatigue sometimes, and that can be especially true when we’re trying to eat healthy. But the simple strategy of changing one part of a dish — how you cook it, or swapping out a single ingredient — as well as rethinking what can be a “dinner food” in the first place can help keep you on track with your goals while making dinnertime more exciting.