I've read several sources that suggest meal portions at most restaurants are fairly large. Neither my wife or I are big eaters. The dining plan gives you a 'table' meal, a quick service meal and a snack every day. My idea would be to begin each day with breakfast at the resort then a larger meal later in the parks, using ADRs for places like the crystal palace or chef mickeys. Does this sound like a way to utilize the dining plan?
Yes it does. There are many ways to utilize the dining plan. It just depends on how your family eats.
That is a great way to use the dining plan. Our family isn't big on a big morning meal so we take pop tarts and bananas with us and use the quick service for lunch and make an ADR for our final meal. It all really depends on how your family likes to eat.
That is a great way to use the dining plan. Our family isn't big on a big morning meal so we take pop tarts and bananas with us and use the quick service for lunch and make an ADR for our final meal. It all really depends on how your family likes to eat.
We do similar to this. We usually buy some breakfast stuff-cereal bread for toast etc (we are DVC so have full kitchen), grap quick service for lunch and ADR for dinner. Although hubby says its not as cost effective, we do maybe one character table service for breakfast around 9am and that is our breakfast and lunch and then have a quick service for dinner, with a snack in afternoon if needed.
Jackie 
That is a great way to use the dining plan. Our family isn't big on a big morning meal so we take pop tarts and bananas with us and use the quick service for lunch and make an ADR for our final meal. It all really depends on how your family likes to eat.
This is our plan as well. I'm not a huge breakfast person, so pop tarts, fruit and grain bars or cereal bars in the room in the mornings, then use our counter lunch fairly early and later dinner. Neither one of us are huge food people either. My plan, right now is to save all our snack credits for using at F&W.
I'm also planning on going to buffets mostly for our 'big' meal as my wife's culinary tastes are not as eclectic as my own. That way we will hopefully both be able to get food we like.
You can also think about doing the Quick Service Dining Plan and using some of the money you save towards doing a bigger dinner or buffet. I also don't know the price difference on the dining plans and it might not be worth doing at all haha.
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We use it for later meals too. It also makes more sense money wise too.
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We did the breakfast in our room thing as well. We also realized that since we get a desert at the quick serve we could choose a yogurt or fruit for desert and save it for breakfast since we never really eat desert anyways. Sometimes we saved our snacks to fill in for breakfast since we found the serving size of the meals quite large.