Traditional meal prepping means getting your meals ready ahead of time. Instead of cooking every meal separately, you cook a bunch of meals all at once and store them in containers. This helps you save time during the week and makes it easier to eat healthy because you already have your meals good to go. For me and my family meal prepping looks a bit different. We don’t really like reheated foods/leftovers so doing bulk cooking for the week doesn’t really work for us. If you don’t really like eating the same thing every day or eating reheated foods, I have some tips and tricks for you.
First, I started out making a list of all the meals we eat regularly. I separated our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and then further into each season. For us, in the late fall, winter, and early spring, we tend to eat more soups, stews, chilis, basically more hearty meals. In the late spring, summer, and early fall, we eat a lot more salads, grilled/smoked meats, lighter meals. I also find it easier for me to have theme night meals. It keeps me from making the same meals in a week, keeping us from getting sick of eating the same one over and over again.
Once I separated everything, I started making notes of meals that used the same base ingredients. You’ll start to see that a lot of meals have similar base ingredients, the difference is in the seasoning/ how it’s prepared. These lists are the starting blocks for everything I do on the homestead. It determines what and how much to plant in my garden along with how and what I will preserve for the year, and any bulk buying that we do.
Every Sunday, I write out a meal plan. I start by looking over my yearly list. I pick the meals that look good that week and make a note of what ingredients they take. 99% of the time I have everything I need or have the necessary ingredients to make a substitution. On the off chance, I’m completely out of something I need, I’ll pick a different meal and make a note to pick up whatever it is on my next grocery trip. The whole point of putting together a yearly list of meals is to have meals you’re guaranteed to have the ingredients so changing out the meals once I pick them rarely happens. Another homesteader recommended this planner. It is a teacher planner so the layout is Monday-Friday with Saturday/Sunday combined, but the layout works perfectly for me.
Once I have my meals planned out, I determine what prep I need to get done. Before I do anything, I clean my refrigerator. Any leftovers that didn’t get eaten, expired foods, do a quick wipe down of the shelves. This lets me know what is in my fridge, see stuff that got pushed to the back, and know if there is anything about to go bad, so I know to use it up that week. I pull out meat of the freezer on Mondays and Thursdays. I keep it in a plastic bin in the refrigerator. To thaw out. I have found that when pulling out multiple days worth of meat, the stuff on the bottom of the bin stays frozen longer, so I make sure to stack it with the stuff I’m using first on the top.
Next, I do my vegetable prep. I use my chopper to dice any onions/tomatoes/peppers I’ll need for the week. I also slice anything that needs to be sliced. Then I peel all the garlic I’ll need, chop and wash any lettuce, and hard boil any eggs. I store everything in these OXO containers except the lettuce. For that, I use this salad spinner to wash, spin, and store my lettuce. I use a lot of OXO stuff. It works really well and is pretty affordable. I will also precook any bacon for the week. I like to leave it in strips and then dice as needed. You can also do a big batch of bacon and store it between parchment paper in bags in your freezer. I will do that and then pull out what I need and chop it up, then toss it in a pan on the stove for a few minutes to heat up.
Once a month I do a big bulk cooking day where I prep/cook meals or parts of meals to go into the freezer. I’ll make my pizza dough for the month. I also will prep chicken for meals by putting one meals worth of chicken in a freezer bag with marinade. Then I Stack them flat to freeze. It makes an easy, no-extra-thinking meal. For quick breakfasts when I don’t feel like cooking, I’ll do a batch of sourdough waffles.
I’m not a huge fan of doing a big bulk freezer meal cooking day. It just doesn’t really work for us. Instead what I do is when I make a meal I know freezes well, like this chicken tetrazzini recipe, I will make a double or triple batch and then freeze the extras. I don’t really have the option to order delivery, we live too far for most places to deliver, so after a month of this, I have a pretty good stock of easy, homemade, freezer meals I can pull out on a busy day when I would otherwise have ordered something.
Is my meal plan set in stone? The simple answer is no. Meal planning is just a general guideline to make sure I have all the ingredients in stock and ready to use. Ten minutes of planning can save you so much time trying to figure out last minute what to make, if you have meat thawed, and what ingredients you even have.
As I said most meals, when cooking from scratch use a lot of the same ingredients, so if my meal plan says baked pasta for dinner and we don’t feel like baked pasta, I can still use that ground beef I pulled out of the freezer and make another pasta sauce recipe, or something totally different like meatballs or burgers. There is a lot of flexibility when you do a general yearly plan. It seems like there wouldn’t be but always keeping a stock of staples, that are unique to you, gives you the ability to make most of your meals.