(Image credit: Faith Durand)

I’ve been meal planning regularly since my first kid was born more than five years ago, and I can say without question that these are the five most helpful questions to get you started on deciding what to make for dinner each week. You don’t need to figure out a Google spreadsheet or browse Kitchn’s recipe page for recipes before you start practicing these five questions every week (or every two weeks if that works best for you). Their goal is to help you figure out what really matters before you even begin to think about a recipe.

Here’s how I do it: On Friday evenings, after pizza dinner is cleaned up and the kids are in bed, I make myself a cocktail and pull out my paper planner to create a meal plan for the week ahead. And every week before I start searching for recipes, I go over these five questions with my calendar.

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From Apartment Therapy → Here’s Proof That Kitchen Contractors Do IKEA Hacks Better Than The Rest of Us

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Keep a bag of frozen tortellini tucked away in your freezer and you can rest easy knowing that a quick meal is always at the ready. This series on fast tortellini dinners will show you how to transform frozen tortellini into dinner using pantry staples and a few surprising techniques. Pasta sauce is just the beginning!

Frozen tortellini deserves to be dressed up and made to feel a bit fancy sometimes. Here’s how: Toss it in creamy, dreamy mascarpone cheese, along with plenty of bright lemon juice, colorful peas, and, most importantly, crispy prosciutto crumbles. It’s the fastest way to turn frozen tortellini to a fancy-pants dish of macaroni and cheese.

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Your range is a wonderful and complicated thing that helps you put dinner on the table. And even though it may see like a complicated heat box machine, it’s actually pretty simple to repair.

The ceramic top has a crack? No big deal! A new one can be popped into place (just don’t cook on it until then, as it could further shatter or lead to some electric shocks!). The oven seems to be giving off a lot of heat? You might just need a new gasket. Is the control panel being wonky? That’s probably an easy fix, too. You can even get a new thermostat or heating element if the oven isn’t heating up as fast or evenly as it used to.

If you’re feeling particularly handy, you can even do a lot of these little fixes yourself (hello, YouTube!), or you can get a certified repair expert out to your house.

The point is: Ranges are almost always worth a fix — there’s just this one time when they’re not.

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If this is the year you finally make corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re here to help! From buying the ingredients to choosing a cooking method, here is everything you need to know about making this Irish-American classic.

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Let’s face it — a simple salad just isn’t enough for dinner. (People tend to complain.) So when you’re looking to turn those last bits of spinach, half a cucumber, and a few chopped radishes into a dinner-ready meal, here’s a trick: Reach for that bag of frozen tortellini.

This brilliant shortcut transforms the last bits of the crisper drawer into a dinner you can make for one or scale up to feed four or more. Here’s how!

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If you have deep kitchen drawers (instead of cabinets), it’s easy for them to quickly become a jumbled mess of toppling plates, plastic containers, mixing bowls and other random whatnots. Can you relate? Yeah, we thought so. There’s hope, though!

Get your kitchen under control with this off-the-wall idea: Use a pegboard inside the drawer!

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We have a hard time finding things we don’t want to buy at IKEA. (How is it all so pretty and functional?) But because we sadly can’t have it all, we constantly have to edit down our wish list to just our favorite things.

With the launch of IKEA’s new line, JASSA, a limited-edition collection inspired by the color and craft of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, we are practicing our restraint. Here is the one must-have from the new collection.

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Keep a bag of frozen tortellini tucked away in your freezer and you can rest easy knowing that a quick meal is always at the ready. This series on fast tortellini dinners will show you how to transform frozen tortellini into dinner using pantry staples and a few surprising techniques. Pasta sauce is just the beginning!

Dinner tonight should most definitely be this almost-instant pasta soup. There’s no need to pry open a can of the store-bought stuff when you’re craving a bowl of something brothy; you can still have a (mostly) homemade soup in a matter of minutes. Everything comes together as quick as can be, thanks to the help of a few freezer shortcuts like precooked meatballs, peas, and tortellini. Simmer everything in a big pot of chicken broth and you’ve got a comforting bowl at the ready.

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Pizza Friday is a well-loved weekly event in our family. To be honest, I can’t remember why or how we started it, but I do know that having this day on the calendar each week has not only brought joy to my children, but also a little more sanity to my meal planning. Friday night pizza serves two important and seemingly unrelated purposes: clearing out the fridge and holding space for family time.

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