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Meal preparation Sunday is a new trend that has developed due to more people wanting to gain free time during a busy week. It’s not hard to see why - we tend to spend around an hour or more cooking or preparing food a day, and so during an already hectic schedule, cutting that down might be seen as desirable. That said, ordering takeout food for the third time in a week is hardly something we feel okay about, especially when we have so many good ingredients and functional cookware collections at home.
Getting started with meal prep can feel like a gargantuan tasks given all of the advice and random tidbits of insight you might see online. So - what about a modest guide, a few simple tips that help you push in the right direction as a beginner? In this post, we’ll discuss that and more:
Get The Right Containers
Easy-to-wash, divided and freezable containers are ideal, as are those that can clip shut safely so storing food is easy. Stackable containers are also ideal so they can fit within your refrigerator correctly. An excellent set of containers at various sizes can hold lunch meals, soups, accessories (for smaller items like grapes), and will be easy to clean.
Consider Easy Recipes To Start
Splitting the meal prep into a range of food groups can be a good idea. So you might have a three-division partition in your container. Steaming some broccoli and rice can fill up two of them, and the final one could be the meat with sauce. Alternatively, opting for an instant pot tikka masala recipe can be stored well and easily frozen, allowing for a swift heatup and retaining all of those gorgeous flavors you intensified when cooking.
Three Meals A Week Is Often Worthwhile
Rotating three or more meal prepped items a week can help you keep your dinners fresh, and if you switch them up on a bi-monthly scale, you’ll be able to keep new recipes coming in and won’t get bored. Of course, you might keep your lunches largely the same or opt for the same oatmeal with different berry additions in the morning, but having a quick meal you can grab from your refrigerator when coming home from work can help you avoid the larger planning.
Meal Prep With Families Is Possible, But Harder
Of course, larger quantities of meals will take more containers, this time larger, and longer cooking times. But it can be done. However, when starting out, you might keep your meal prep focused on your office job throughout the week, or providing your child who has just started working with a refrigerated prepped meal instead of a packed lunch. In the long run, you’ll be able to adapt that which you’ve learned to a larger scale.
With this advice, we hope you can get started with meal prep in the best possible way. These insights should help you get your foot in the door, and eating healthy as the months tick on.
My wife is good at cooking more than needed, even for lunch the next day, and then making meals for later. Makes sense to me.
ReplyDeleteI need to start doing this. I find myself returning to the fridge time and time again wondering what there is to eat. Meal prep would make my life so much simpler!
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