Meal Prepping Q's

punkypump

Need some honest input 🙏

If you prep a whole weeks worth of meals, how many days worth do you freeze?

Do you make two different options for lunch meal prep or eat the same thing?

How do you keep costs down for meal prep?

Do you prefer counting Macros or having a set Meal Plan?

Thank you in advance for the wisdom 😊

cmriverside

Sounds pretty individual.

I wouldn't eat the same meals more than two days a week, but some people eat the same thing every day.

Up to you.

I don't meal prep a whole lot. It just takes a few minutes to prepare the meals I do make, and I like (and need) lots of variety.

MsCzar

I rely heavily on my freezer but don't usually meal prep per se. Like cmriverside, I can whip up a fresh meal in minutes and enjoy eating a variety. However, when I make a big batch of something like chili, soup or stew, I freeze it in pre-portioned meal sized containers. Other than that, while I don't prep individual meals, I do prep and portion quite a few meal ingredients like leftover sauces: cubed pork, chicken, taco meat, grated fresh carrots, frozen garden veg, and fresh cabbage slaw. The meal I prep most often is breakfast: overnight oats that I top with frozen berries which thaw by breakfast and sliced veg or bean pastes that I bag and add to omelets or egg wraps. Some folk prep and freeze egg burritos, but with the pre-sliced veg, I can make it fresh as fast as I can microwave the frozen version.

kshama2001

I used to make four lunches and four dinners on Sundays. I cooked two packages of chicken thighs and they were four to a pack. I would make four using one recipe and the other four with another recipe, plus a starch and a vegetable.

While doing this, I also made five days worth of hard boiled eggs for snacks.

On Fridays I would get Chipotle for lunch, eat half, and have the other half for dinner.

If I wanted to use the freezer, I would save this for colder weather because soups/stews freeze well, but I don't eat foods like that once the weather gets warm.

These days, I make sure I always have cooked chicken on hand, either by cooking extra as part of a meal, or buying a rotisserie chicken, which can be surprisingly economical. Cooked chicken can quickly be turned into a sandwich, a wrap, an entree salad, a stirfry, or chicken, rice, and beans. (I always have cooked rice and beans around.

These days I'm loving canned baked beans (and rice, chicken, and power greens.) When it's colder I like recipes like Cuban rice & beans or Lebanese rice & lentils (plus a meat and veggies.) These make large quantities and freeze well.

goal06082021

If you prep a whole weeks worth of meals, how many days worth do you freeze?

When I'm prepping lunches for the week, I don't freeze any of them and they are all still fine by Friday. I've been doing this for several years and have yet to get sick. If you're prepping for someone who is more vulnerable to foodborne illness, or if you live in a place with more lax food safety regulations, you may want to freeze half of your servings and defrost midweek, or even freeze it all right away and move one serving at a time into the fridge to defrost overnight.

I also prep breakfasts, and lately I've been alternating between breakfast burritos (~8 servings/batch) and baked oatmeal (6 servings/batch). I only need a max of 5 breakfasts during the week, so the extras do get frozen and I build up a cache of breakfasts I can use sometime in the future when I don't have the time/inclination to prep a fresh batch. The burritos get wrapped in parchment so I can freeze them right away and they still reheat quickly (~2 min in the microwave); the oatmeal bars get wrapped in foil, and they stay in the fridge because they take too long to reheat otherwise (~15 minutes in the toaster oven from the fridge, considerably longer from frozen).

Do you make two different options for lunch meal prep or eat the same thing?

Same thing all week. I have a rotating lunch menu of six different preps that I cycle through, though, so it's not the same thing week-to-week. I find six weeks is long enough between repeats that it doesn't feel like I just had beef stew (or whatever), while still being manageable from a grocery-shopping standpoint. Right now my rotation is as follows:

1. Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli
2. Chicken parmesan over zoodles (this is a new addition as of this week. Previously week 2 was stir-fry, which was delicious but a bit of a PITA to prep, as it meant I had to cook all 8-10 servings one at a time rather than cooking a big batch and then splitting it 8-10 ways)
3. Pasta or grain salad with kielbasa and vegetables (very flexible/seasonal, warm grain salad in the fall/winter and cold pasta salad in the spring/summer - the kielbasa is often on BOGO sale and it can be frozen for later use)
4. Chicken salad (I either buy two rotisserie chickens or cook a whole 3-4lb bag of frozen chicken thighs in my Instant Pot; the rotisserie chicken carcasses get frozen with veggie scraps and eventually turned into stock once I have enough scraps)
5. Chipotle-style rice bowls or salads
6. Classic beef stew with carrots and potatoes (this became coq au vin/chicken stew one week when beef prices were insane).

How do you keep costs down for meal prep?

The aforementioned six-week rotation - I've selected six recipes that call for common, inexpensive ingredients, and that are easy to prepare 8-10 servings at a time. I have a good, sharp kitchen knife and I know how to use it, so I can do a lot of prep-work (cutting up veggies, trimming meat, etc) myself. Your personal calculus for how much time you can spend on the act of meal prepping (including shopping, preparing ingredients, the actual cooking, and packing into containers) and how that stacks up against how much money you can spend on acquiring ingredients is going to differ from mine.

Do you prefer counting Macros or having a set Meal Plan?

I feel like these are two different things - you can count macros with a meal plan or without, you can plan meals with or without worrying about macros. I personally don't worry about macros much, focusing more on calories. My preps tend to be in the same general calorie range (~300cal for breakfast, ~500 cal for lunch, ~700 cal for dinner most of the time, plus or minus a hundred calories or so).