Last summer I asked my mom when we were home visiting how she kept dinners remotely interesting for 20 years. Her answer was pretty simple. She wrote all of her meal ideas on idex cards and put them in a photo album that she kept in the kitchen. Every time she tried a new recipe, if it was a "keeper", it went into the book. If not, it got tossed. Each week, she would go through the book(s) and pick items and mark the corner with a pencil dot so that she knew when she had worked her way through all of them.
I will admit that I stole the idea and have my own little album growing! I subscribe to Real Simple and LOVE it- they have a weeks' worth of "easy dinners" as a separate section each month. Over the course of the month we work our way through those and either keep or toss the different recipes.
This week's menu all took about 20 minutes of "active prep" each and came from back issues of Real Simple:
Sunday: Chicken breasts stuffed with roasted red peppers and feta with roasted broccoli and new potatoes
Monday: Fritata with veggies
Tuesday: Coffee-braised brisket with root veggies in the crock pot
Wednesday: Sloppy Joes with cole slaw and green beans
Thursday: Meatloaf with egg noodles and veggies (my old stand-by)
Friday: Fish Fry
I use my crock pot a lot and try to plan my meals so that I can do the bulk of the chopping/prepping on Sunday and then portion out the diced onions, garlic etc over the course of the week.