Meal Prep

andreadsteen1216

New here! Definitely interested in meal prep. Excited to see some ideas and any tips and trick.

ChickenKillerPuppy

My method is not for everyone, but I eat basically the exact same meal for breakfast, lunch, and snack every weekday (not the same thing for each meal, but the same breakfast, the same lunch, and the same snack), and I have about a dozen dinners I rotate. I love what I eat and this makes it very easy and allows me to shop and prep and log my meals well in advance. It wouldn't work for everyone, but for me it makes everything 1000 times easier and removes difficult decision making at times I would be tempted.

The other thing I do is every Sunday I make a soup or stew that will have 2-3 additional portions I can eat during the week. Again, just having it around takes away the decision making at times I would be tempted to indulge more, and I'm only making stuff that is delicious to me.

cwolfman13

My meal prep is pretty limited...for one thing, I have issues with keeping food for prolonged periods of time...I'm pretty much a 72 hours and that's gotta go kind of guy. Also, a lot of things just don't keep or re-heat well for later and just gets gross by the end of the week.

The extent of our meal prep is that we always cook something fresh for dinner...that's pretty much non-negotiable, I just don't do "leftovers" for dinner. In our planning our dinners for the week, we make sure that at least two of those dinners are; 1) acceptable to reheat later...some things just aren't, and 2) that meal provides enough food to provide my wife and I both a lunch or at least the main portion of a lunch...so basically we end up having leftovers for lunch 2-3x per week depending on the dinner menu.

My wife also usually makes a batch of quinoa or something on Sundays that we can add to whatever we're having for leftovers for a couple of those lunches if the dinner leftovers don't provide enough of a side dish or something. She usually makes enough for each of us to have two portions so she sometimes has to make another batch later in the week depending...if that first batch isn't gone by Wednesday, it's gotta go Thursday...though my wife isn't quite as OCD about that as I am.

Most weekdays, my breakfast is Coach's Oats, topped with fresh strawberries and two boiled eggs as I take it with me and eat when I get to the office. I boil enough eggs for the week on Sunday in my Instantpot and store them in an egg container with the shell still intact...and just nuke the oats in the morning (though I occasionally make them the evening before). I also will trim vegetables like broccoli or cauliflower or asparagus or whatever so that when packing lunches or using for dinners, at least the trimming and chopping is done. For lunches, if I'm not having leftovers, I usually have a sandwich...my wife usually has a meal salad. At most we prep these the night before, otherwise sandwiches get soggy and salads turn sad.

In essence, we do a few things that make packing lunches and whatnot a bit easier and more efficient...but generally we prefer our food to be fresher. We tried the full on meal prep thing for awhile and just weren't feeling the freshness, particularly towards the latter part of the week, so we kinda bagged that whole thing. A lot of what we do involves a lot of planning, more so than prepping everything ahead of time. We create our dinner menus over the weekend and usually do the shopping on Sunday. The plan helps us with shopping so we have exactly what we need and know how and where it will be used as to eliminate food waste and money waste.