You’re describing my exact situation. I’m the cook in the house and my goal is to have weekday meals take no longer than 20 mins to prepare for the whole family. My kids are really picky too, so pasta, eggs, avocado toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, etc are the staples and can all be made pretty quickly.
So, the 20 mins on a regular night would look like:
0:00: Boil water
10:00: Put pasta in the water to cook, put a few frozen marinara cubes in a saucepan to heat, put one frozen meal in the microwave
15:00: Put the other meal in the microwave
20:00: Drain pasta, add marinara, top with cheese, put meal-prep dinners in bowls
Its a real struggle. I can count my Cal and plan my days. But than I can hear someone shouting at me from the off “this is ridiculous, I dont like that, do you want to do that every sunday, this is flabby…”
I’m a passable cook, but Jamie Oliver I am not. My wife is Russian/European, and is an exquisite cook. So I’m faced with the “I’d like to have Curry with pomegranate reduction this evening.” And I’m here, ready to throw some pasta in a pan and get on the bike
I enjoy food, but it’s more of a fuel source than anything. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have chosen cycling as a discipline.
Instead of the bike… I’m headed to the store to get fresh pomegranates to start the reduction process. Because… husband duties.
Sounds like giving meal prep a go might be the best of both worlds. Your wife can cook elaborate meals, that you can quickly heat up later when you want them.
Awesome post! Thanks for this, exactly what I was looking for to get started eating on a more consistent schedule and eating the right foods. I have the Feed Zone books and have made some food out of them and all have been great so far.
It probably doesn’t save much time if you are using a lot of fresh fruit etc but you can portion off all the dry ingredients (do the same for frozen stuff portioned in the freezer) and add the wet stuff the night before.
I guess I tolerate consistency and simplicity a lot better than most people. The recipes listed here all sound fantastic but I don’t often have time (even on weekends) to do that much cooking. I do however prepare nearly all of my meals at home - just in a much simpler manner.
Typically do the following twice a week, all at the same time:
Throw either chicken breast or pork tenderloin in my sous vide
Prepare beets with onions and garlic to roast in my oven
Prepare collard greens or kale (plus the greens from the beets) to cook in my pressure cooker
When the kale is finished I throw a dozen eggs in the pressure cooker to hard cook them (3 or 4 minutes depending on your model)
That lets me prep all my lunches with about the same thing - large serving of cooked leafy greens, chicken or pork, roasted beets, an avocado, and a hard cooked egg. All of which adds up to around 650 calories with a good quantity of both fat and protein.
Your way sounds much tastier but mine requires relatively little intervention (I can do the sous vide and pressure cooker then hop on the bike for an hour or three and not worry about over cooking or anything similar) and all tastes pretty delicious to me even day after day
Missed this thread before, but going to have a look through.
I do meal prep all the time. I try to do it with extra portions a lot of the time. 4 in our family, when I cook at weekends or slow cooker during the week, I double or triple the recipe, to give spares for the freezer.
I use the foil takeaway containers, and write the meal and the date on the top.
Nice post! Thank you. This is helpful advice, especially now.
I’m meal prepping for a couple of weeks now, so I can plan my grocery shopping better and don’t have to go to the store as much. It helps me a lot to have control over my nutrition. Since I track my calories with yazio, it’s also so much easier to log my meals. Yazio is the nutrition app I use btw (https://www.yazio.com/en/food-diary).
I don’t snack as much as before, too. I didn’t expect the last couple of weeks to be so beneficial for my diet, but meal prepping really made it very efficient. Has anyone else started meal prepping since corona?
Jeez. going to have to spend more time going through this thread. So much valuable information. My wife is the primary cook, though I do a fair share. She plans a week at a time. Especially when school is in session (she teaches) as it allows 1 trip to the store for the week and overall lowers her stress.
I can put requests in for the week. I also will add to meals (rice, etc) when I need more. I constantly search for new ways to fix what I keep in our freezer.
One thing my wife has become fond of are “Dump Dinners.” Somewhere online she got pages of recipes. The page is setup for something like 10 meals. Lists everything you need. Then you build all 10 meals at one time in freezer containers. (they are different meals - you just go down the list and add the ingredient to different bag numbers). When you need a meal, pull one out of the freezer and put it in the slow cooker.
This is a good idea. I make a lot of stews and casseroles; they’re large recipes and keep for a while. But I typocally just stick the pot or casssrole dish in ths fridge covered up, then nuke a plate at a time when I need. Of course what usually happens is I get sick of it before ke and my wife make our way through the whole pot…
I thought I’d see what meal prep hacks people have?
We recently figured out if we break up the weekly meal planning it makes it way easier. We choose our meals on Friday, shop on Saturday and cook on Sunday instead of trying to do it all on Sunday and having it take up the whole day.
