Meal Prep 101
Are you ready to do a lil meal prep 101 with me? Let's face it. I'm not a nutritionist, life coach, or fitness instructor. So I am no expert on this subject. But I am a mom who has no time and has found a few things that make my life a little easier when it comes to weekly meal prep. I thought I would share because we are all in this together right? This is my latest post for KitchenAid, so hop on over to the Kitchenthusiast for my Meal Prep 101 "class."
I have tried full on make-every-meal-for-the-week (breakfast, lunch, snacks, + dinner) on Sunday. But that didn't work for me. It lasted all of ... count it ... one weekend. It was overwhelming. I probably tried to do too much. Sound familiar? I got a lil overzealous with homemade granola bars as snacks, etc, etc. It wasn't fun. So if you are looking for the cook-one-day-of-the-week-and-you-are-done kind of food prep you have come to the wrong place. I just don't find it to be realistic for me. Instead for this meal prep 101 "class" I thought I would share what works for us every week. The first tip I share in my meal prep 101 post on the Kitchenthusiast is to start with a plan. We make simple things for breakfast and lunch that don't really require any planning, so for us this really just means planning our dinners for the week.
Multi-task is my second food prep 101 tip. You can chop veggies while salmon is baking. And you can assemble raviolis while your slow cooker is heating up.
Another tip I share is that your multi-cooker or slow-cooker is your best friend when it comes to meal prep for a week. You can cook large amounts of food, and you can start it and leave it while you move on to prepping other items. It's one of your best meal prep tools in the kitchen.
Another food prepping 101 tip I share is to duplicate the recipe. Instead of making a menu item each day of the week, double up on two or three different dinners and eat leftovers the other nights. We make just two meals per week. We eat leftovers the other nights, and it never fails that we end up getting take out at least two days a week. So we just plan on it now.
As far as real life meal prepping 101 goes, we chop up green peppers, mushrooms, and scallions for the week. We use these in eggs in the morning and salads for lunch. It's easy, and we can get Flynn man to eat some veggies in his eggs this way.
Salmon is a great meal prep for the week item. It's super healthy, and you can eat it for lunch on salads (hello blackened salmon caesar salad from Nordstrom that I'm always trying to replicate) or for dinner with some veggies. I find it to be delicious hot or cold, which makes it easy to prepare. I just dabbled into my meal prep 101 tips here, so make sure to go to the Kitchenthusiast for my meal prep 101 full post. And in case you are interested, here are all of my posts for KitchenAid. Thanks for being here!
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