What We Ate This Week: Aldi Meal Plan for Back-to-School Week

The first week of school is officially here, and if your family is anything like ours, everyone is tired.

The kids are adjusting to early mornings, new teachers, new schedules, and all the emotions that come with heading back to school. But apparently, I’m just as tired as they are! I’m getting back into working more full-time while also trying to hold space for all of their first-week-of-school emotions. We are headed into a 3-day weekend, which, when I first looked at the calendar, annoyed me. The first Friday off? Now I see the wisdom.

When I sat down last Friday to meal plan (you know I love to plan our week first on Friday and then plan meals around our schedule), I definitely wasn’t going to get ambitious with dinner. Nope, for our weekly meal plan, I focused on easy dinner winners. You know the meals I can whip up without a ton of effort and, maybe more importantly, meals I knew the kids would actually be excited to eat.

And we all needed a little comfort food this week, too.

If you are new here, I do one big Costco monthly haul. Mostly to stay on budget. I usually spend $400-600 on one trip and get most of our meat and staples there. Then, after church on Sunday, I do a quick grocery trip toAldi while the family fills the car with gas, vacuums, and washes the car. I love this little rhythm so much. This isn’t an Aldi-only meal plan, but Aldi is where I bought most of what we needed for the week, and you could also grab everything I used at Aldi!

The result was a very realistic Aldi meal plan filled with easy family favorites: steak and crispy potatoes, our traditional first-day-of-school walking tacos, French dips, chicken nuggets, burgers, and even a night when I didn’t cook at all (because my husband’s grandmother taught me to call leftovers “Planned-overs” because you plan on them).

Nothing complicated. Just easy back-to-school dinner ideas that made getting through our first week back a little easier.

Love my meal planner? I designed it and use it in our own home! You can shop my meal planner here to make planning out your week (and answering “what’s for dinner?”) a little easier.

Our Aldi Meal Plan This Week

Here’s what was on our meal plan for the first week of school:

• Steak, crispy air-fried potatoes & caprese salad
• Walking tacos
• French dip sandwiches
• Chicken nugget salad bar
• Greek grilled chicken, rice & naan
• Raising Cane’s catering
• Burger bar
• Leftovers

If you’re looking for easy family dinner ideas for the back-to-school season, hopefully you’ll find a few here to add to your own meal plan. If you’re looking for meal ideas to go, check out this post.

Steak, Crispy Air-Fried Potatoes & Caprese Salad

We kicked off the week with a bigger Sunday meal since it was our last day before the first day of school and everyone loves steak!

I made steak with crispy air-fried potatoes (I cut them thin, coated them with olive oil, seasoned them with salt, and cooked them at 400 degrees for 20 minutes) and caprese salad. I just used tomatoes and basil from the garden and added some olive oil, sliced mozzarella from Aldi, salt, and a dash of balsamic vinegar. I eat the tomatoes, but because I am dairy-free, my daughter eats the mozzarella. It works!

Walking Tacos — Our First Day of School Tradition

First day of school means walking tacos at our house! We’ve done this for as long as my kids can remember, and they ask for it every single year. It’s a Midwest concession stand staple. You can read more about it here.

I love that it’s one of the kids’ favorite back-to-school traditions, because it’s easy and repeatable. A good reminder that traditions don’t have to be fancy to matter. Speaking of which, we always do apple nachos on the first day. If you haven’t tried those, you MUST. Check out the details here.

Walking tacos are also exactly the kind of dinner I needed after that first day. They are easy, the kids love them, and everyone gets to add whatever toppings they want, which is great because I am dairy-free and gluten-free, so I swapped the Doritos for Fritos or tortilla chips.

If you want to make them for your family, you can find my full Walking Tacos Recipe here, including everything you need and our favorite toppings.

French Dip Sandwiches

Next up were French dip sandwiches. Another comfort-food dinner that doesn’t take much effort because of how I make the meat.

I warm up some oil with garlic (from a jar) and then cut the lunch meat into smaller pieces. I sauté that until it’s warmed through. Sometimes I add thinly sliced bell pepper and onion too, which turns it into a little hybrid French dip/Philly cheesesteak situation and sneaks in some extra veggies.

Meanwhile, I heat up some beef broth with more onions in a saucepan for the au jus. I can’t use a lot of French onion soup mixes because of dairy and gluten, but if you don’t have to worry about that, you can grab a can of French onion soup and prepare it according to the directions on the can for easy dipping.

I open the hot dog buns, top them with a couple of slices of provolone, and broil them for 3-5 minutes, until the cheese is melty. Then, I pile the meat on top. Warm sandwiches, melty cheese, and au jus for dipping are always a win around here.

This is the kind of meal I love putting on our weekly meal plan during a busy week because it feels like comfort food without requiring me to spend all evening making dinner.

Add an easy side and dinner is done. We did raw veggies and fruit, and as a treat I got individual bags of chips. The kids love that. It’s like when my mom used to buy me the little cereal boxes as a treat when I was a kid. Remember those?

Chicken Nugget Salad Bar

Chicken nuggets can absolutely be dinner. If Chick-fil-A can sell a chicken salad, why can’t we?

I turned ours into a chicken nugget salad bar by putting out lettuce, crispy chicken nuggets, and all of our favorite salad toppings so everyone could make their own. I love the Perdue gluten-free chicken nuggets at Costco, so I make a few of those for myself.

Like the walking tacos, this meal is served bar-style, so some kids will eat it all separately. Some will eat the veggies and meat and get no lettuce. I can make myself a big salad that’s dairy- and gluten-free. Everyone wins.

Build-your-own meals are one of my favorite easy family dinner ideas because everyone can make their meal exactly how they like it and I’m still only making one dinner.

Greek Grilled Chicken, Rice & Naan

For another easy dinner this week, we had Greek grilled chicken with rice and warm naan bread.

This is an easy one to customize depending on what you have in the refrigerator. Add cucumbers, tomatoes, hummus, tzatziki, or a simple Greek salad. I make the Greek salad, I share here.

Top the chicken with the salad, tzatziki, and feta. My favorite tzatziki is Aldi’s cucumber dill. You can find it with the salsa and guacamole in the refrigerated section.

To stay dairy-free, I swap the feta and Tzatziki for hummus. It’s SO good. My kids love naan bread, so I always warm it up for 5 minutes in the oven and slice it up as a side.

It’s fresh and filling but still easy enough to make on a school night.

Raising Cane’s Catering

Does picking up Raising Cane’s catering for the dance team and ordering enough for your own family count as meal planning? If not, at least I won the “best mom” award from my daughter. So, it’s a win-win. I had to feed the dance team, so I just ordered extra for us before the first home football game where my son will be playing on the field, and my daughter will be dancing on the sidelines. I am so excited.

That’s exactly why I look at our calendar before I make our meal plan.

An easy weekly meal plan isn’t about cooking seven homemade dinners. It’s about looking at what’s happening that week and figuring out how you’re going to feed everyone.

This night, we planned Raising Cane’s.

Easy Burger Bar

Another guaranteed family winner this week was a burger bar. All summer we make one night a week “burger of the week.” We scour restaurant menus and take photos of burgers we want to recreate at home. This week, my parents are coming over to swim in our new pool, so I kept it simple and will let everyone make the burger how they like it, but I got all the toppings.

Add cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and whatever else your family loves. Serve the burgers with fries, chips, fruit, or whatever you already have that needs using up. We did s’mores for dessert because it still very much feels like summer here in the Midwest and I am a-ok with that!

Sometimes, having one night that’s just set for a season is the decision that makes life easier.

Leftover Night

And finally: leftovers.

I intentionally leave room for a leftover night because by the end of the week, we usually have a little bit of everything sitting in the refrigerator. We call this “choose your own adventure” dinner, and it’s my kid’s favorite night of the week. Plus, we clean out the fridge and eat all those leftovers and bits and bobs I’d hate to waste, and I don’t have to make another dinner on Sunday night!

Win, win, win.

Easy Meal Planning for a Busy Family

If there’s one thing the first week of school reminded me, it’s that your meal plan should make your life easier, not become another thing you have to keep up with.

Some weeks I have more energy to try new recipes or spend more time making dinner.

This wasn’t one of them.

I was tired from getting back into working more full-time. The kids were tired from getting back into school. There were new schedules, activities, and lots of emotions to hold.

So this week I needed easy weeknight dinners.

Doing most of my shopping at Aldi helped keep things simple. I filled in with what I had from Costco and food we already had at home rather than feeling like I needed to buy every ingredient for seven completely different meals.

That’s what meal planning looks like for us in this season.

Sometimes feeding your family well looks like steak, crispy potatoes and a caprese salad.

Sometimes it’s chicken nuggets.

And sometimes it’s picking up extra Raising Cane’s because you’re already getting it for the dance team.

It all counts.

More Aldi Meal Planning Ideas

If you love seeing what other families are actually eating, I’ll be sharing another What We Ate This Week meal plan next month.

And if you’re looking for even more Aldi meal planning ideas, check out my Aldi Shopping List + Weekly Meal Plan, where I share seven more family dinner ideas and what I bought for the week.

You can also grab my Walking Tacos Recipe if you want an easy dinner to add to your next meal plan—or start your own first-day-of-school tradition!

And if you’re wondering about the meal planner I use, I designed it! You can shop my meal planner on Amazon here. I love having our meals written out where everyone can see them—mostly so I don’t have to answer “what’s for dinner?” 47 times a day. 😉