It can be really hard time sometimes finding new recipes for dinner. Families seem to get stuck in a rut of the same dishes over and over again. Some get so stuck, that they give up cooking at home all together and start spending way too much money on take out or restaurants. Here are some simple methods to get out of the same old, same old dishes and make it easier to find new recipes for dinner.

Try to rotate the "protein" throughout the week. Usually the protein (meat, fish, cheese, etc.) is the main ingredient in recipes. Rotating between beef, pork, chicken, cheeses, fish and any other ingredient you may like keeps the week's meals fresh and makes sure you vary the dishes you prepare for the family. At the very least, don't have the same protein two days in a row. If all you like is chicken and cheese, have chicken breasts on Monday, a cheddar cheese dish on Tuesday, ground chicken on Wednesday, something with feta cheese on Thursday and so on.

If you feel overwhelmed by all the cookbooks you have or the thousands, if not millions, of recipes for dinner on the internet to sort through, limit your options by using at least three ingredients you already have in your pantry or refrigerator. You can turn this into kind of game to see how many recipes use the three ingredients you would like to use that doesn't require a trip to the grocery store. Challenge yourself even more by seeing how many items already in your house you can use in a dish. After some practice, the game may even turn into keeping the trips to the grocery store to once every 3 weeks or even a month.

One of the best uses of a good search engine online is to filter through thousands of recipes on your favorite foodie website. Some of the best sites for finding a variety of recipes for dinner are:

• Taste of Home: Everyday people, not usually trained chefs or food professionals, submit recipes to this site. It has one of the best search engines. You are able to filter by many different categories and still get a decent selection of recipes for dinner to choose from.
• Food Network: The most popular chef celebrities and their wonderful recipes live here. Have a favorite cooking show or star chef? Browse through just their recipes and follow their cooking styles like a true fan.
• Betty Crocker: Recipes here obviously list a bunch of Betty Crocker products to use in the recipes. Do you not have enough time to make everything from scratch? Betty Crocker has made a business of helping out the semi-homemade chef by offering boxed side dishes, bread mixes and much more to cut the time of dinner down to what you can really manage.
• Top Secret Recipes: When this site first came about, all the recipes were free and accessible. As it grew in popularity, they started to make some of the recipes part of a paid membership. It still has a bunch of great recipes for dinner that are knockoffs of popular restaurant dishes. Good option for picky little ones that need Olive Garden marinara or Noodles Mac 'n Cheese.

Let's not forget about the cookbooks you have in your house. While they are more difficult to search through than anything on the web, they are still good resources for recipes for dinner. It's best to have an ingredient or two that you are looking to cook with in mind and then use the index in the back of the book (more detail than the table of contents) to browse the listed recipes.

No matter what method mentioned above that you decide to use to find new recipes for dinner, don't fret over finding the perfect dish to keep mealtime exciting. The main goal here is to keep those homemade dinners coming to the table along with the valued time you spend with your family while eating them.