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What is a Meal Prep Hack?
Meal prep hacks are quick and easy shortcuts or strategies you can make to help make prepping meals easier and more doable, especially when you are doing a million things and have a million places to be.
These five tips or hacks won’t over-complicate anything for you and they aren’t expensive! They are quick, simple tasks you can do today that will have a huge impact on your day, week, or month!
Why You Will Love These Meal Prep Hacks
- You don’t need anything fancy to do these – no fancy containers, no notebooks, and no apps (unless you like these things then I have some in my store check them out here!)
- Work these hacks into your personal schedule, they are flexible and can change as your schedule changes.
- You can start with one or two ideas from here and see a big difference, then add another one if you feel comfortable.
- You will waste so much less food and therefore save so much money!
- Get rid of the “What’s for dinner?!” stress.
Easy Meal Prep Hack # 1
Start with 1-2 meals per week.
Instead of trying to figure out how to prep every single meal for the whole week for the rest of your life on one day, just think about 1 or 2 meals you can prep this week.
Pick one meal, like lunch or breakfast, and make enough for three days. This is called batch cooking and it can be really easy! Check out more of what I mean here on my Batch Cooking blog post.
Start with a small easy 5-10 minute recipe like making overnight oats for breakfast and prep it on Sunday night. Make three days worth and you will see how much of a difference having a healthy breakfast ready in the morning will make. Doing something small like this helps you build momentum and confidence in your meal prepping abilities.
You got this!
Try one of my overnight oats recipes by click here to get started! My favorite is the Banana Cream Pie or the Peanut Buttercup.
Easy Meal Prep Hack # 2
Use leftovers as the base of your next meal.
Save money and time by using your leftovers for the next meal! Don’t throw away the extra rice, grilled chicken or roasted vegetables you have, put them in a container and save them to use as the start of your meal tomorrow!
Example: I recently made this Cool Ranch Crock Pot Chicken and made burritos with it and then used the leftovers to make BBQ Chicken sandwiches.
We saved so much time because the protein was already made and just needed reheated in the saute pan with the sauce!
Easy Meal Prep Hack # 3
Chop once, use twice.
If you are already have the cutting board and knives out for a recipe why not cut enough for a couple recipes? Chop a bunch of the veggies up and then stash it in a container for later use in the week. This step will save you so much time from meal prep and doing dishes later in the week!
Keep the vegetables fresh by storing them in air tight containers or baggies with zip tops. This works great for carrots, onions, celery, cucumbers, peppers, etc.
Easy Meal Prep Hack # 4
Double your dinner.
This is one that really saves time later on!
You can do this one of two ways.
- Make enough of your dinner to package up for leftovers for lunch the next day. Easy, healthy, cheap lunch idea and it created no extra work for you.
- Purposefully double your recipe so that you can have two full pans, pots of soup, etc and package it to freeze. You can thaw it out and pop it in the oven or heat it on the stove top if it is something like soup whenever you need it and it created no extra work for you!
You can try out my Healthier Chicken Taquitos that are great for either of these meal prep hack ideas!
Easy Meal Prep Hack # 5
Create a “meal prep station” once a week.
Make meal prep manageable by not spending 10 hours of the day in the kitchen trying to make 10 meals and a huge mess.
Pick one hour out of the week to do the following:
- Batch cook a protein (ground beef, saute/grill chicken, tofu, etc.)
- Wash, peel, and chop a few vegetables to put in containers. Just pick one, maybe do the onions because then you only have to cry once this week :).
- Make your salad dressings or measure out the sauce ingredients for something you want to eat later this week.
- Cook a grain to be used later, think batch cook rice, quinoa, or pasta, cool and store in the fridge.
If you do these quick things that take a few minutes you will easily be able to throw a healthy dinner together in a matter of minutes later in the week!
Bonus Hack
Meal prep isn’t perfect, you just need it to work for you to make your own life easier!
If you are feeling overwhelmed by watching others meal prep and plan no worries. Starting small and picking just one of these 5 hacks to try this week will help you feel more comfortable and I know you can manage it!
You got this!
Meal Prep Recipes To Try This Week
Steel Cut Oats and Quinoa Bowls
Black Bean and Corn Quesadillas
Meal Prep is Budget Friendly
Meal prepping can save you money in the long run. If you have everything cut up and ready to use you are more likely to waste less over the course of time. Each month when you use something up instead of throwing it away you are saving money! At first it might seem small, but small changes add up quickly!