Small Bites:
🍽️ What’s for Dinner?: The Summit — a free virtual summit from Order Up! guest Brett DuPree, August 17–19 — is three days of real dinner solutions from 20+ food experts, timed right for the back-to-school scramble. Save your free seat
👨🍳 Want the kids doing more in the kitchen this year? The Kids Cook Real Food eCourse teaches them how to actually cook (not just follow a recipe!) so they build real life skills along the way. Learn more here
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Get Ready for Back-To-School!
The lunchboxes are back in rotation, the mornings start earlier, and somewhere around five o’clock the same question turns up every night: what’s for dinner? Fall has a way of turning weeknight cooking into a logistics problem, right when there’s the least time to solve it.
So we did something we’d been meaning to do for a while. We went back through two years of Order Up! interviews — chefs, cookbook authors, dietitians, and a lot of parents in the middle of it — and pulled out the advice that’s genuinely useful on a Tuesday. Not the special-occasion stuff. The get-it-on-the-table, everyone’s-fed, nobody-cried version.
A few ideas came up again and again: cook one meal instead of five, take the pressure off yourself and your kids, and let the freezer carry some of the weight. Here’s what they told us.
One Dinner, Not Five
The quickest way to make a weeknight harder is to cook two dinners (or three. Or four). Almost everyone we talked to had landed on the same fix: make one meal, and build in a little room to customize.
Chef Kris Dovbniak, founder of the Healthy Mama Meals app, calls it a base meal: one shared foundation, then a handful of toppings so everyone builds their own plate.
“You start with one shared base: a grain like rice or quinoa or pasta, a protein like chicken or chickpeas. Then you offer a few mix-and-match toppings or sauces.” -Kris Dovbniak
Read the full interview right here:
Natalie Kotesova, creator of Wholesome Nat and mom of three, is blunt about it: separate meals just create more work. She cooks one dinner, then lets each kid adjust it with a drizzle of almond butter here, extra sauce there.
“Don’t make separate meals. Make one meal and customize it.” — Natalie Kotesova
Your job ends when the food hits the table
Half the weeknight stress isn’t the cooking — it’s the worry about whether the kids actually eat it. Two of our guests offered the same quiet reframe: decide what and when, and let them handle the rest.
Jennifer Anderson, the dietitian behind Kids Eat in Color, has a line she gives parents who are staring at a half-eaten plate and feeling like they failed.
“Your win is not when your child eats the food. Your win is when you put the food on the table. That’s your job as a parent. Your child’s job is to decide whether and how much they eat.” — Jennifer Anderson
Jessica Lawson, the recipe developer behind Big Delicious Life, zooms out even further, past any single dinner that goes sideways.
“My pediatrician always tells me: focus on the week, not the day.” — Jessica Lawson
Find both of their full-length interviews right here:
Cook Once, Coast Twice
You don’t have to be a full-on meal prep parent, but you can pre-cut a few vegetables or prep some snacks, and a number of our guests gave us a great tip to lean hard on the freezer. Batch what you can, and stash the surplus before you’re sick of it.
Chef Mareya Ibrahim Jones, “The Fit Foodie,” keeps weeknights simple by cooking in volume: a roast chicken, a pot of grains, a sheet pan of vegetables that stretch across several dinners.
“For families, it starts with planning simply. Think in volume and versatility.” — Chef Mareya Ibrahim Jones
Noah Galuten, cookbook author and chef-dad, has one freezer rule that changes the math on a hard night.
“Freeze things when they’re at their peak, not right before they go bad… The fourth night of minestrone is a slog. Freeze it. Pull it out in two weeks. Dinner’s ready. You’ll feel like a hero.” — Noah Galuten
Read the full interview here:
You don’t have to like it. You have to try it.
Picky eating outlasts any one dinner, and pushing rarely helps. The through-line from our guests: keep offering, keep it low-key, and play the long game.
Leigh Ann Chatagnier, modern Cajun cookbook author, traded total control for an 80/20 rule once her son started grabbing Chick-fil-A after practice.
“The goal isn’t that he eats everything I make at ten. The goal is that he’s an adult who’ll try anything.” — Leigh Ann Chatagnier
Marta Rivera Diaz, chef and author of Sense & Edibility, reminds us that it is all about patience and exposure.
“To honestly say a kid doesn’t like something, you have to offer it at least 10 times.” — Marta Rivera Diaz
Hand them a job
Getting kids into the kitchen is a back-to-school reset that pays off all year; not because dinner comes together faster, but because everyone slows down together.
Marc Forgione, chef and father of three, has kept the same setup by the stove since his son was a toddler.
“Since he was two or three, we’ve had this little foldable box he can stand on next to the stove so he’s at counter height. From the beginning, I’ve tried to involve him… But I’ve never forced anything on him.” — Marc Forgione
Nephi Craig, White Mountain Apache chef and father, frames the whole thing as something bigger than getting fed.
“Season the food with smiles, stories, and laughter. And when our kids help, it forces us to slow down.” — Nephi Craig
And on the nights it all falls apart
Because some nights it will. The plate gets thrown, the mac and cheese that was a favorite yesterday is suddenly offensive, and dinner is toast and apple slices at 7:15pm. Jamie Milne, the cookbook author behind Everything Delish, said the part out loud that every parent knows:
“No matter how busy our days are, we show up and eat together every night, even when Jack is being a little tyrant and throwing his plate.” — Jamie Milne
That’s the whole thing, really. Not a perfect dinner. Just showing up to the table together, one ordinary school night at a time.
This fall, we’d love to hear from you: pick a tip above and try it this week, revisit an interview that stuck with you, or tell us the one dinner that always works in your house. Leave a comment, send us an email, or hit us up on Instagram @onepotatobox. We can’t wait to hear from you!