Weekly Meal Plan 2025-10-11

For this week’s menu, I chose old favourites from our meal plan, with chicken for our Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Yes, turkey is the traditional choice, but we find it dry, so we’ve made chicken instead, for the past few years.

Tip: To create your own meal plan, get my free Excel Weekly Meal Planner template.

There’s a cool and cloudy week of weather ahead, with rain in the forecast for today and tomorrow. It’s officially fall now, I guess!

Even though we’re having chicken for Thanksgiving, instead of turkey, everything else for that meal is traditional.

Keith makes stuffing, and I make gravy. We also have mashed potatoes, mashed turnip, carrots, and corn.
For dessert, there’s pumpkin pie, and I’ll make apple crisp (apple crumble).

Dinner Rolls

And, for the first time ever, I’m making the Thanksgiving dinner rolls. Here’s the recipe that I used, on the Brooklyn Farm Girl blog. I did a test run on Thursday, and they turned out perfectly! I baked them for 15 minutes, at slightly below 350°F, because our oven runs a bit hot.

Time Warning: The recipe says 1 hour 16 minutes, but that’s the time AFTER they come out of the bread machine.

In my machine, the dough cycle took 1 hour and 55 minutes.
There’s also a bit of prep time for the bread machine, and for the final rise (in the baking pan)
Overall, the time is close to 3.5 hours.

The Weekly Plan

Here is our plan for the week starting Sunday, Oct 12, 2025. There are links for some recipes, and others are made “freestyle”.

Note: Beside each recipe, I show the number of times that we’ve made this recipe, since I started keeping track in 2015.

Sunday — Chicken, roasted ( 180 times )
TIP: Longer cooking time for stuffed chicken

Monday — Chicken, roasted ( 180 times )
Note: Thanksgiving leftovers

Tuesday — Easy Red Lentil Soup ( 2 times )

Wednesday — Sheet Pan Lemon Garlic Salmon ( 35 times )

Thursday — Hamburger Scramble ( 40 times )

Friday — Fish & chips ( 56 times )

Saturday — Ribs, Barbecued Back ( 89 times )

How It Actually Went

Here’s what we actually had this week (to be updated later).

Sunday — Chicken, roasted

This was our family’s Thanksgiving dinner, and everything went as planned. Instead of turkey, we cooked 3 large chickens, with stuffing in two of them.
We cooked the chickens on Saturday, and sliced them up, so everything just had to be reheated on Sunday.
Then, about 30 minutes before dinner, the chicken went into tightly-foil-covered pans, with about 1/4 cup of broth in each pan
The oven was pre-heated to 350°F, and were heated for about 25 minutes.

Monday — Chicken, roasted