Meal Prep 101

Meal Prepping

Planning your meals in advance takes a little effort, some time, some strategy and will pay off in the knowledge that you will have answered the “what’s for breakfast/lunch/dinner’ question for a few days in advance. What a lovely stress relief! You will not waste food, save money on not buying lunches, and most important of all, you will eat healthier.

Don’t try to do too many meals as you start out. If it’s dinner that causes you the most trouble knowing what to have each night, then just plan dinners. If it’s breakfast that you skip because there’s nothing in the cupboard or fridge to have, then only plan breakfasts to start. Lunch? The same thing – just plan what your lunch will be for the coming days.

Start with 2 meals – it doesn’t have to be a whole week. You can build for a few days. Those food box services are great for this idea – they have you pick what you want, deliver all the ingredients so you are ready to get cooking. They are great, but they can be expensive as well. With a little planning, you can have all the ingredients you need for your own kind of food box ready to go!

The other thing you need to keep in mind is the space you have – on your counter, in your cupboards and especially in your fridge and freezer. You don’t want to plan meals and then realize you don’t have the room to keep them fresh.

My Tactics

When I meal prep I like to keep it simple during the week and try new recipes on the weekend when there is more time to experiment.

It’s usually dinners that I plan in advance for a few days. I do like to plan breakfasts as well with overnight oats or baked oatmeal or yogurt & granola – each portioned out separately. And lunches are often leftovers from dinners or a salad or wrap with some roasted veggies, avocado, hard-boiled egg, canned salmon or tuna and crackers… These can be added to your routine when you get into the rhythm of planning your meals. Fresh fruits in a bowl on the counter are easy to grab to pop in your lunch bag.

Look at your schedule as well and see what meals work best for the coming evenings. When our sons were playing hockey, baseball, lacrosse and/or soccer, there were (sometimes overlapping) practices a few times a week either late in the afternoon or early evening so dinner had to be planned to the minute to get them fed nutritiously! Now that I think of it, this is when my meal planning really started to get serious!

So, I sit down armed with a pad of paper, write down the nights I want to plan for and have a separate grocery list. I have my phone, laptop or iPad, various cookbooks, and have my site up to pick a recipe from there too and go through recipes I can see will be an easy to prepare weeknight dinner or a recipe that I have made before. I like to balance vegetarian meals with chicken, pork tenderloin, fish and sometimes beef. As I wrote above, I make the more complicated or time-consuming recipes on weekends.

Next, I go through each recipe I have picked for that meal planning list and start the grocery list. It’s a lot of up and down as I go to the pantry to see if I have the ingredient or if it needs to go on the grocery list. This is important – don’t assume you have an ingredient as it’s so frustrating to go get it when cooking and it’s not enough, gone or expired.

I love to spend Sundays cooking and baking when my schedule allows, so Saturday morning is often my meal planning and list making and grocery shopping day. Plus any new recipes and ingredients I need to get for Saturday and Sunday night.

I also do a quick inventory of what containers I have and what room I have if I am planning on making a larger amount of one meal (soup for example) to make sure I have the space in the fridge and freezer. Freezing some cooked meals is heaven-sent on those busy nights when the best-laid plans don’t work out and you can grab a delicious dinner from the freezer in the morning to thaw for that evening’s dinner. I prefer glass containers but there are also some much-loved Tupperware ones I have that I cannot part with, yet. Freezer bags are handy too as they take up less space and can lie flat – just make sure, of course, to seal them securely if you put anything ‘liquidy’ or saucy in them. IMO they are best for cut-up veggies and dry goods, even cooked rice or quinoa or pasta or roasted veggies.

Speaking of cooked rice, quinoa, pasta and roasted veggies. I usually make extra when cooking for the meal we’ll be eating it at, or I will precook and refrigerate them cooked so it just needs a quick reheat and not the 20-30 minutes they take to cook from dry. It’s great to have extra of these available in the fridge to build lunches over the next few days as well.

So, now you have your list of meals and you have gone grocery shopping! You can start your prep!

Cut up the veggies as per the recipe. If you are going to keep them for a couple of days, sprinkle some water over them to keep them fresh and not dry out before you seal the container or bag they are in. I find labelling is key – as some recipe ingredients look similar with some subtle differences. Add the date as well. I use painter’s tape and a marker as the tape comes off the container or bag easily when I’m washing it.

If meat has to be portioned or cut up, do that now and store it in the fridge. I find this part of the recipes isn’t that time-consuming compared to prepping veggies so, I often do not prep meat ahead of time.

Make up sauces and salad dressings and store them in the fridge in glass jars. Again, label and date.

Cook up the rice, quinoa, other grains, pasta – whatever is on your meal planning list.

Do some larger ‘batch’ cooking – make a big pot of soup, stew or chilli, to have for dinner one night, lunch the next and then freeze the rest for another lunch or dinner another day. Once again, label and date – if freezing the date is important to know how long it’s been in the freezer.

If you are ambitious and want to make breakfasts, lunches or snacks as part of your meal planning, think about making them in separate containers to make the grab and go super easy. Salads, hummus and veggie sticks or crackers, a hard-boiled egg and crackers, sandwiches, wraps – each in its own container or baggie. I find a healthy snack quickly available stops me from grabbing an unhealthy fast snack fix.

Another fabulous time saver is to prepare and freeze a slow cooker meal – uncooked – that you thaw and put in your slow cooker in the morning. I am working on some of these recipes so stay tuned, and in the meantime, there are lots online to look up and try.

As an example, take my Kung Pao Chicken recipe. This is an easy recipe to meal plan as you can cut up the chicken, clean and prep the veggies, and make up the sauce ahead of time and keep them (separate) in the fridge until you want to make this dish. Then pull the chicken, the veggies and the sauce out and you are ready to go! If you have made up rice ahead of time, heat that up and you have dinner on the table in a half-hour.

So now you know the way I organize my family’s meals for a few evenings. Simple and it works for me! Hope it helps you too!

What meal planning tips do you use? Leave me a comment to let me know!