In our household I am currently the cook for 5 nights out of 7, although that is going to change soon! when I start work full-time. I must admit I tire of churning out something decent each night. We have a boarder and because of this we have raised our usual standards for our nightly meal. This is beneficial for all of us - but does takes extra effort. I set the table with a tablecloth, and water glasses with ice and a dash of lime, and everyone serves themselves from bowls in the middle , as opposed to my plating the dishes up.
So ... what do we eat? It is different all the time. We don't have a rota the way some families do. (We do tend to have spaghetti bolognese once a week at the moment, though, because it is so easy to cook up bolognese sauce on the weekend and freeze it for an easy Wednesday or Thursday night option.)
I tend to shop on Friday, so it's easy to cook fish on Friday evening. Tonight I cooked this:
http://www.annabel-langbein.com/recipes/lemon-fish-pie/83/ which went down pretty well, and I served it with peas (ex-frozen). I didn't have enough potato so I subbed in the equivalent amount of parsnip, which I had bought in bulk on special a week or so ago, and which needed eating. I also didn't have enough lemon so I reduced the lemon juice to 1 tablespoonful - it was fine.
This week I had a lot of various types of sausage in the freezer - it was all 33% off - and not much else (because ... nothing else was on special, and we had done a week of 'eating down the pantry' the week prior). So we had 3 sausage-based meals. DH made a pissaladiere - fancy kind of pizza - topped with sausage meat and caramelised onion and olives; another night I made bangers and mash; and finally last night I turned lamb sausages into sausage rolls, as I happened to have puff pastry on hand. I used
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/33669/moroccan+lamb+sausage+rolls+with+yoghurt+sauce and served the sausage rolls up with the spinach and yoghurt etc.
The teenager made a meatloaf last weekend.
Desserts happen maybe 2 nights out of 7. This week I made panna cotta, and another night I made lemon sago pudding. The teenager sometimes makes chocolate brownies. The preschoolers have a nightly dessert which is usually natural yoghurt with either jam or canned fruit.
For breakfast, most of us eat oatmeal, supplemented by toast (bread from the breadmaker). One of the preschoolers tends to sleep in so sometimes he has a banana smoothie for breakfast with a Weetbix blended in for bulk.
For lunch, we eat either peanut butter sandwiches, or leftovers from dinner. After dinner, we often get out the plastic boxes and parcel up our lunches for the next day straightaway. For the teenager's lunch, I tend to make a loaf of bread in the breadmaker on the weekend and then call her downstairs to make up 5 peanut butter sandwiches and then freeze them for the week. This works really well.
For snacks, I like to make mango lassis (canned mango from Indian shops, rosewater, cardamom powder and yoghurt) and banana smoothies. I make an oat bar out of rolled oats, banana, dates and nuts for the biscuit tin which make portable morning teas for the kids to take to preschool or swimming lessons.
We cook all our meals and never ever eat out.