Meal planning and prepping may seem overwhelming. Especially when you see so many influencers and others pulling out 80 containers, 100+ ingredients, and making the same meal for days on end.
It doesn’t have to be like that! Meal planning and prepping can look many different ways and you have to find the strategy that works best for you and your family’s time, budget, and appetites.
If you don’t enjoy eating leftovers every day, that’s ok! You can still meal prep and make it easier to prepare your meals and stick to any health or budget goals you currently have.
I used to be a meal prepper with all of the containers, then I got bored. I stopped doing it because I was tired of eating the same thing every day of the week and I felt like I was wasting a lot of food. I would make something for supper, and instead of being able to eat our leftovers in a timely fashion, we would already have lunch made and then I would make something else for supper (because of boredom, I couldn’t eat the same thing for lunches every day and also supper!) My creativity in the kitchen was feeling a bit squashed.
So, I changed our style. I planned to make healthy suppers that would also be good for our lunches and taking to work as leftovers, but only for one day not multiple days in a row. Both my husband and I are fortunate enough to be able to warm our lunches up at work, which leads to us not wasting as much food and also being able to have more variety. Allowing myself to be ok with not meal-prepping a whole week at a time honestly took some time to rethink and for my brain to be alright with that idea. I felt like that wasn’t the right choice due to the content I was reading, watching, and listening to.
I thought meal prepping this way was going to save me time and money because I was ready for the week, but it didn’t. I was throwing away a lot of food and the boredom with my meals led to snacking which didn’t help us meet our family’s financial or health goals. I thought that if I wasn’t perfectly measuring items, prepping everything days in advance, and eating the same thing every day wasn’t going to help me.
That hasn’t been true at all! I am so much happier and hitting both the financial and health goals I have for my family! Now knowing that I will have variety in my lunches, yes there are still leftovers, but only a day or possibly two days if I like the meal (I mean hello Slow Cooker Baked Potato Soup).
I also love the fact that I am throwing away less money and time. Utilizing the food in my fridge, the leftovers, and prepping using the strategy below are ways I like to do this. We go out to eat less and I actually use the food in the fridge. I plan around our week and look for when I have time to prep what. I don’t have to take a whole afternoon to do this, I literally just do it while I am making supper one night.
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My meal prep strategy now includes – whenever I have a vegetable out for a meal, I look ahead at our week and see when or if I need it again, and then I cut up extra of that vegetable. An example of this would be onions. Or for snacks on the weekends between games, I am cutting up celery and carrots anyway, so I do the whole package. This way snack veggies are all ready to go and I only made one mess! I also do this with proteins. If there is a similar protein in a meal later in the week I will double and freeze it right away. By putting it in the freezer and not the fridge, it seems to preserve the flavor and doesn’t taste like leftovers. I like to store my proteins in a glass container in the freezer, these Ello Brand containers come in a variety of sizes. These meal prep strategies only add a few seconds to my meal prep for the current meal and save me minutes for the next meal in prep and dishes.
I promise you, taking away the stress of feeling like you have to make every meal all in one night is freeing. Prep the things you can when you can, you will be amazed at how the small parts of a recipe being done will save so much time throughout the week!
Check out our meal plan subscription if you want some help with the meal planning and prepping portion of your life. I love meal planning and I will send them right to your inbox with a grocery list. All you have to do is shop, prep, and enjoy! PS, I will send tips for the prepping part each month too to help you!