Giving our caregiver a weekly menu without it turning into the same four dishes

silver_diary_20854 Sept 2026

Our caregiver cooks the children's meals on weekdays while I am at the factory. She is careful and the kitchen is spotless, but the menu has narrowed to four dishes in rotation, and my elder daughter has started refusing two of them. I would like to give her a simple weekly plan. I don't want to hand over a chart she finds insulting, and I also don't know how detailed it should be. Do those of you with cooks or caregivers write out a full menu, give a list of options, or decide each morning? How did you introduce it?

5 comments

amber_diary_72454 Sept 2026
we get a weekly menu from our daycare and its the most useful piece of paper we receive. for someone at home id start with a list of options for each day instead of a fixed chart so she still gets to choose
- breezy_spoon_49674 Sept 2026
  Agree with options. I did the cooking plan for my granddaughter's household for a while. A list of eight or ten dishes on the fridge, she ticked what she made. Nobody felt checked on.
mint_pebble_82804 Sept 2026
we sit with ours on sunday for ten minutes and she suggests half of it. she knows what the kids will eat better than i do
pebble_quilt_93374 Sept 2026
Ask her what she likes to cook also. Our chechi was making the same few things because she thought that's all we wanted. When I asked, she had a whole list of dishes from home she had never tried on us. Now we have puttu twice a week and my son is very happy 🙂
plum_parrot_81785 Sept 2026
Up for the pool run, so reading this from the side. With my daughter's training I needed to be specific about protein, so I wrote 'one dal, paneer or egg dish every day' instead of naming dishes. Our cook got freedom and I got the one thing I cared about.
coral_sketch_7838 Sept 2026
we did a whiteboard. lasted two weeks, then my 5 year old started writing 'chips' on every day 😂