If you have ever tried to eat healthier, chances are good you tried meal prepping. Learn how to meal prep without spending all day in the kitchen or eating the same meal all week long.
What does meal prep mean? Meal prep is any food you prepare or set up ahead of the time you plan on eating it. This can involve something as simple as chopping vegetables you got from the farmer’s market, pre-cooking a big batch of rice, creating 5 meals that you then portion into individual containers, pr freezing some dinners for next month.
Meal prep does NOT mean that you drive yourself insane creating an assembly line in your kitchen and lock yourself in there for an entire day!
In fact, there are several different strategies to meal prep that you may be unfamiliar with.
These include buffet style, which means you prep single ingredients such as veggies or protein. The prep can include chopping, cooking, or marinating/seasoning. Then, you can lay these out family style for a mix and match night. This works really well for Taco Tuesday.
Another strategy includes batch cooking, which means you make multiple servings of a meal that you can enjoy all week (or at least for the next 3-4 days, per food safety guidelines storage chart here).
A third strategy is just portioning out foods, such as snacks, into individual servings. This is most helpful when you have a schedule that requires a lot of driving or being away from home, as well as summer picnics.
Another strategy (and one I rarely use), is assembling ingredients to cook later. This would be a freezer meal strategy. Personally, my family and I don’t care for freezer meals, and rarely eat large enough quantities of any meal to justify the work behind this. If you prefer the freezer method, check out Sweet Peas and Saffron for ideas.
The final strategy is pre-cooked meals that you can heat and eat. Because my family enjoys hot food more than cold food, we tend to follow this prep strategy most.
There are pros and cons to each method, and you may find that you resonate with one strategy most. However, using a couple of these methods together will reduce boredom and increase your satisfaction level.
Why is meal prep important?
Let me share some of my personal finds with you. Over the past few months, I have dedicated myself to both weekly meal planning and meal prepping. Over that time, I never had to answer the dreaded question, “What’s for dinner?”, and my family saved anywhere from $150-$300 in our monthly grocery budget. Plus, I also managed to lose 10 pounds.
By the way, I don’t always choose to meal prep. There are a variety of reasons why a person may decide to meal prep every week. Some of those reasons could include:
- Budget concerns
- Trying to lose weight
- New diet or healthy eating program
- Bored with current way of eating
- Interested in reducing food waste
By the same token, if you spend a season meal prepping, you may find yourself taking a break from the weekly grind. The good news is- dedicated meal prepping will continue to fuel your future meal decisions and health goals.
Meal Prep Tools
Before you get started with meal prepping, it is easiest to have some basic tools on hand. Tools range from meal plans to food containers and kitchen essentials. Because each of this could easily be an entire blog post, I am summarizing simple ways to build an essential meal prep system.
- Meal Plans
Meal prepping is the action you take to stick to your meal goals. However, you cannot take action without having a list of recipes, ingredients, and food groups that your whole family can enjoy. Those make up your meal plan.
Let’s start with recipes, and where to source them. You can buy a book, subscribe to a magazine (Eating Well and Vegetarian Times are my favorites), assemble a Pinterest board (or follow mine!), or find another digital source for your recipes.
The important things to notice when it comes to recipes is a recipe does NOT equal a meal plan. Collecting recipes is a good start, and identifying your staple recipes is even better. However, it is NOT yet a meal plan until you lay those recipes out in an organized fashion so you can have the ingredients and food groups on hand to complete meal prep.
The most important tool for successful meal prepping starts with a good meal plan.
(Not interested in spending hours putting together your recipes? You can find my weekly meal plans right here (includes gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegetarian options).)
I love browsing new recipes, because I bore easily, and I sample at least 2-3 new recipes weekly. My favorite place to find new recipes is Pinterest, but I also get inspired on a monthly basis from magazines.
When it comes to finding recipes for your meal plan, you can make it easier on yourself by using key words.
Those key words could be a specific diet plan (such as vegetarian, Paleo, keto, gluten-free, etc), an ingredient (such as chicken, pork, lentils, tofu), or by meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner). You can also make your searches easier by including words like “easy”, “healthy”, “budget” or “breakfast”, “dinner” or by specific method of cooking “Instapot”, “slow cooker”, “crockpot”.
What I find most frustrating with most meal plan recipes I have found is a) they are bland b) they use ingredients I don’t like c) they separate food groups.
Bland– It’s great if you are eating grilled chicken and steamed broccoli all week long for lunch so you can drop that pesky 10 pounds. Yet, how many days on end can you enjoy the taste of grilled chicken? Much less tolerate broccoli that steadily gets soggier and more pungent by Friday?
I like to infuse my recipes with a good mix of international cuisine (did you know I have a BA in Global Studies), such as Mexican, Indian, Mediterranean and Thai flavors! We keep it spicy in our kitchen. I can honestly say that our spice cabinet is more packed than our pantry staples.
Let’s talk ingredients. While buying a whole package of some random ingredient to create some fancy sauce for one dinner a night can be fun for the foodies out there, it is a recipe for disaster for the average meal prepper!
Instead of trying to find 20+ ingredients to make one meal, recipes need to be something you can put together using what you typically keep in your pantry. If you are new to cooking, meal prepping will help you identify your weekly staples, so you can keep them on rotation (and search for more appropriate recipes in the future).
A special note about grocery lists– I don’t use spreadsheets or complicated software. If you gravitate towards spreadsheets, go for it! Or, you can use the good old-fashioned pen and paper or Notes function on your phone (which can be texted to your spouse if they’re shopping that week).
This is why I find most meal plan recipes useless for my family’s needs. I’m not going to eat sweet potatoes every week (I prefer those in the fall), I don’t generally use protein powder, and salad ingredients would waste away in my fridge.
Plus, since I am rather flexitarian in my diet, I easily grab recipes that range from vegetarian to keto to Paleo and back to comfort food.
Lastly, you probably have seen pictures of proudly displayed meal prep containers or lunchboxes with 3 or 4 compartments, which each represent a separate food group.
For example, one section is for protein, one is for fruit, one is for nuts, and one might be for grains.
Who eats like this???
I come from a whole tradition of kitchen cooking that is one pot, one bowl, one skillet, etc. Not to mention I married an Indian man, whose traditions include a variety of delicious hot foods that are often combined on top of each other for maximum pleasure.
If I eat a properly balanced meal with a delightful combo of protein+fat+carbs, then all I need is a single serve container. Or, I might have a side compartment for a drier ingredient.
I am not interested in creating an assembly line of food, and I am guessing you don’t have the time to separate 3 or 4 food groups for each meal either. Close that kitchen down and spend less time assembling, cooking, and cleaning in it!
Note: If you are being very intentional about measuring, or learning how to portion out meals based on very specific numbers, this can be helpful for you. Fortunately, once you have established what proper portions are for you, you no longer need to “keep them separated”.
You may be wondering how you can meal plan when NO ONE in your family likes the same food!
I hear you. My husband prefers rice and spice, I prefer vegetarian meals, my teen wants seafood every day, and my youngest craves beef.
One of the best ways to have a good meal planning strategy when you have a family that has very different food tastes is to set themes.
Here is what our themes have looked like in the past:
- Meatless Monday
- Taco Tuesday
- Wrap Wednesday
- Travel Thursday (international- varies by week)
- Fridge Friday (leftovers)
- Super Saturday (kid’s choice)
- Snack Sunday
This leaves some flexibility in terms of what recipes to rotate and which ingredients to use. Plus, if I am feeling uninspired, and the kids know what our theme is, they can help me with deciding (and even grocery shopping if we need some fresh produce). Get those kids in the kitchen!
This also allows me to re-purpose leftovers that I prepared for buffet-style eating earlier in the week. Grilled food on Saturday could become a sandwich for Wrap Wednesday. Travel Thursday leftovers could become part of a smorgasbord of snacks for Sunday with a few homemade sauces or dips.
- Containers
Meal prep usually involves storing your food. How many and what type of containers you have can make this process easy or a nightmare!
Your container needs will depend upon what meal prep strategie(s) you use.
If you batch cook, pre-cook, or assemble freezer meals, then you will need a combo of high quality glass containers (I like Pyrex) and freezer-safe storage bags. If you are not fussy with hot food or have some cold meals, then you can also use stainless steel containers such as Lunchbots or Mason jars.
Here is also where personal preference comes in: overall, my family is unlikely to eat cold or pure liquid meals. Therefore, you likely won’t see ideas from me on overnight oats, smoothies, leafy salads, or soups (stews are more my style).
If you use buffet style or portion methods, then you will need plastic containers and storage bags. Please note that most plastics are not safe to microwave, and there are reusable storage bags available. My go-to resources for safe plastic containers is Mamavation, and here are some more Earth-friendly resources for storage bags from TG Organica.
- Kitchen Essentials
The last thing I want anyone to do is go buy $300 worth of kitchen “essentials” (that defeats the purpose of easy, doesn’t it?).
Yet, in order to meal prep successfully, you must have some go-to tools to make the job more efficient and easy to prep more than one item at a time (especially if you batch cook).
Here are some of my kitchen essentials:
- Cookie sheets
- Covered casserole dish
- Square baking pan
- Blender and/or food processor
- Measuring cups/spoons
- Crock pot
- Waffle Iron
- Stock pot
- Veggie peeler and grater
- Microwave steamer
- Rice cooker
And here is how I might use these for one 2 hour meal prep session:
- Cook a sheet pan meal on the cookie sheet (here are some of my favorites from Eating Bird Food)
- Blending breakfast muffins to put in the square baking pan
- Slow Cooking some shredded chicken or carnitas in the slow cooker
- Boiling some jasmine rice while steaming some edamame in the microwave
- Making a batch of waffles or spaghetti squash fritters in the waffle iron
By the way, you don’t need to do all of these things at once- it is simply a demonstration of why it’s important to have a handful of tools in your kitchen, and how you can use them in different ways.
How to Start Easy Meal Prep
I would not recommend cooking every single meal for the entire week in one go when you are starting out. That is like going from a 1 mile run to a marathon in just one week!
Instead, choose just ONE MEAL.
What I have found in conversations with coaching clients is they struggle MOST with one meal every day. That meal represents the time of day they have the least amount of energy or interest in putting in a lot of work.
That is the meal you should focus your meal prep efforts on!
I am a big breakfast eater, but I find that cooking up a big breakfast every day from scratch just does not work. During the school year, I also find that lunch time can be a very small window of opportunity for me.
We almost always have enough time to cook dinner from scratch most nights. Plus, my husband appreciates a fresh dinner.
That is why I am more likely to prep breakfast and lunch ahead of time. I don’t often have the time or energy to worry about what to eat during the busy morning rush (and often post-exercise for me), and my afternoon schedule is always subject to change based on whether I book a speaking gig, have a networking meeting, or meet a friend for coffee.
Another reason I might prep lunch is I usually prefer to eat plant-based meals for myself, or I experiment with quite a few grain-free recipes that my kids are simply not interested in (though they always try my creations). One of my favorite bloggers for vegetarian meals is Budget Bytes, and grain-free ideas mostly come from the Wholesome Yum.
Let’s briefly talk about snacks. I do a combo of homemade snacks like crackers, roasted chickpeas, protein bars, muffins and pre-purchased snacks from brands like Hippeas, Skinny Pop, Vega, The Good Bean, Sahale, or Blue Diamond. You can find a list of 25 of my favorite snacks here or favored brands here.
Remember, the difference between meal planning and meal prepping is one involves having a strategy and the other involves getting it done.
Figure out When to Prep
The hardest part of meal prep for my clients is carving out dedicated time in their schedule to actually do it. Setting some regular days/times can be the most helpful step to tackle this.
When I was working outside the home, I typically meal prepped my lunches the night before work, with occasional days that I just mixed and matched out of the leftovers. My husband and I split dinner responsibility.
Now that I work inside the home, I meal prep breakfast, snacks, and sometimes lunch for a few days ahead. Lunch can also be leftovers from dinner, though I generally don’t eat more than 2 days of leftovers EVER. Dinner is now usually my responsibility, though my teen will sometimes take over pasta night or breakfast for dinner meals.
I have meal prepped on Sunday, Wednesday, and occasionally Fridays, though typically I complete my grocery list on Sunday. I spend approximately 2 hours every week on prepping, though sometimes more if I do a third session.
Here is my typical meal prep (varies by week)
Sunday: Prep breakfast/snacks/dinners for the next several days.
Wednesday: Prep lunch/snacks for the next several days
When you look at your weekly schedule, which day(s) are you more likely to have a good chunk of time to prep some meals? And, which meal(s) would those be? This is also a good time to incorporate prepping some meals to your individual tastes/preferences, even if your family isn’t interested.
If you struggle with time management, choose the same day/time every week and schedule it in your calendar!
Want me to help you both plan and prep in one day? Join me for a make-and-take workshop in Minneapolis on September 15, and eat yummy lunches all week long. This includes some kid-friendly lunches that you can send your little superheroes to school with.
