Our top 10 meal prep hacks and tips
Lately, it seems like everyone in our orbit is looking for meal prep tips and hacks, whether they’re feeding their families or cooking for one.
When it comes to healthy eating and meeting your health and nutrition goals, preparation and planning ahead are often the most important variables in determining how likely we are to succeed. If your home is stocked with cooked healthy foods and/or groceries (especially if they’re delicious), you’re likely going to eat them. If you have no plan, groceries and/or time when a meal rolls around, chances are, you’ll end up making choices that you won’t be happy with. It’s often this simple, but how do we bridge this gap?
Meal prep can be daunting though, and can feel like a HUGE undertaking, especially if you’re new to it and don’t know where to start. It’s something we spend a lot of time on with our clients, and work to address their unique schedules, preferences, and time constraints to make it work for them. The key with meal prep is you need to make it work for you and find a system that works best for your life.
Here’s a roundup of our top tips to help you get started:
Tip #1: Find your meal prep style
Everyone is different in terms of what works for them. For example: [Merrill] I like to write out my entire menu for the upcoming week on the weekend with a day by day game plan for groceries and prep. [Lauren] I can walk to Whole Foods and have a little bit of flexibility in my day, so while I do a lot of advance prep to set myself up for success (i.e. rough meal plan for the week, big shop on sundays, make ahead freezer meals/meal components), I’ll typically map out each day the night before (or do 2-3 days at a time) and grab whatever I don’t have first thing in the morning if needed.
It might be easier for you to visualize the whole week, or you might want the option to change your mind later on and work 1-3 days at a time. Either way, having a plan always helps. If you’re not sure, try out both and see what feels right.
Tip #2: Make grocery shopping work for you
There are so many shortcuts and tools at our disposal to make grocery shopping easier. A few tools we love and rely on.
We love using the iphone notes app to keep a regular grocery list with staples that we always like to have on hand - you can adjust/modify it in real time when you run out of things and weekly based on what you’re making that week. You can also share this list with your partner or anyone else in your household so you can both update it as needed. Or if you’re old school and keeping a physical running shopping list, we like these 3x5 post it notes for their stick factor.
Plan 1-2 shops a week and put it in your calendar, or if that’s not feasible, use instacart or the Amazon Whole Foods app and please don’t feel bad about it for one second! We all have a lot going on and these tools are meant to support you during seasons of life when we need them.
Explore local farmers markets to leverage seasonal produce. Bonus = makes for a great activity / family outing.
Tip #3: Your freezer is your friend
This might be our most important and favorite tip. Use your freezer to your advantage - it’s the best meal prep tool in your toolbox.
If you’re making a freezer friendly meal, double down and freeze extras. Or carve out time weekly or monthly to prep some freezer basics. Some of our favorite freezer meals/foods we love to prep: meatballs (turkey and beef), turkey burgers, soups and stews (this chili and this lentil soup are go-to’s, see A Few More Things below for even more ideas), rice and grains (cook double and freeze!), pancakes and waffles, pesto (freeze in 1-2 tbsp silicon molds), muffins (love these and these lately) or quick breads and frittata muffins.
Favorite store-bought frozen items: proteins (beef, fish, poultry), pre-cooked freezer items like Applegate turkey sausage, frozen fruit and veggies for smoothies or simple veggie sides, frozen rice, veggie burgers, anything Dr. Pragers for the kiddos, and more.
Tip #4: Keep meal prep simple and prepare (or account for) a few essentials to get you through the week
For some people, it’s easier to have an exact plan of what they’re making and prep accordingly.
If you’re focusing on dinners, we like to break our week’s down by protein as a starting point for planning. For variety, we generally follow the below breakdown:
1-3 poultry centric dinners
1-2 beef centric dinners
1-2 fish centric
1-2 plant-based dinners
For others who want more flexibility in their week, we recommend preparing (or purchasing) a few essential meal components so that you can readily pull together meals with little legwork in real time. For the latter approach, this is a good starting place:
Prep 1-3 proteins: we love hard boiled eggs, baked or grilled chicken, meatballs, turkey burgers, roasted or pan seared salmon, chicken/tuna/egg salad, crispy roasted tofu, roasted chicken sausage coins (we love Bilinski’s), beans or bean salads. Or buy pre-cooked: rotisserie chicken, Applegate frozen turkey burgers, Hilary’s, No Bull, or Dr. Prager’s veggie burgers, Melissa’s or Trader Joe’s precooked lentils.
1-2 veggies: roasted sheet pan veggies for the win! Typically 5-10 mins of hands on time and then a set and forget situation for a big payoff. Think: roasted brussels, sweet potatoes, carrots, butternut or delicata squash, bell peppers, mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus or any combo of these. Here is a good guide to roasting vegetables. It’s pretty foolproof, we promise! Or keep frozen veggies on hand to steam or saute quickly and dress up with a sauce (see ideas below).
1-2 dressing/sauces: always elevates a meal and is so nice to have on hand when you want more flavor and have no time in the moment. Pesto, tahini sauces, salad dressings are all great options. Check out our website for tons of recipes we rely on heavily in our kitchens. We also love Primal Kitchen, Haven’s Kitchen and Gotham Greens for store bought!
1-2 starches: roasted starches are always a great option (i.e. butternut squash, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes), but we also love cooking a big batch of brown rice or quinoa in bone broth (we love Fond) or chicken broth. If you’re going through the effort of cooking a grain, friendly reminder of tip #2: your freezer is your friend - highly recommend doubling down and freezing extras. You can also buy pre-cooked frozen grains at most grocery stores to make this even simpler.
Tip #5: Then buy a few staple items to help turn these into meals and round out your week
A few things we always have on hand to pull together meals more readily:
Almond milk or milk of choice, protein powder, nut butters, frozen and fresh fruit, pre-washed greens, pre-cut raw and frozen veggies, crackers, hummus, yogurt, cheese, eggs and avocados.
Tip #6: Make a keepers binder, folder or google doc
Keep a binder, folder or google doc of all your go-to recipes. We find that this comes in handy when you’re lacking inspo so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Every time you get a new keeper, add it to the binder/doc!
Tip #7: Make kitchen time “me” time
We love listening to a podcast or watching comfort TV while meal prepping - it ends up being time we look forward to vs. a burden. Real life: this was much easier pre-kids, now cooking usually involves shorter spurts of time with Daniel Tiger or Sesame Street in the background. But on the days we can get some quiet time in the kitchen, we love turning it into me time.
Tip #8: Or, consider outsourcing meal prep
If you’re tight on time or simply hate cooking/meal prep, maybe this is something that is worth outsourcing to leverage your skills and limited time elsewhere! If you’re a parent with access to help at home such as a nanny or mother’s helper, maybe this is something that you could weave into the job description. Or look to local facebook groups to see if you can find a local chef who might be offering these types of services. We also can't emphasize enough the power of buying pre-cut / washed elements of meals (think fruits, veggies, or even pre-marinated meats) if it is within your budget and can save you time!
Tip #9: Use these solutions if you’re worried about overbuying/wasting produce or protein
This is a common fear amongst clients, but our tip is to overshoot - any extra veg can be turned into crudite for healthy snacking, or roasted for more sheet-pan veggies if it’s on its way out. Another great way to use those sheet pan veggies = blend with bone broth for easy, foolproof soup.
You also can freeze any greens for smoothies and any extra protein can always be thrown in the freezer as well for a later date.
Tip #10: Frequently clean out and “merchandise” your fridge
Make this a weekly practice: toss anything in your fridge that is past its prime. Move older but still good produce and protein front and center and come up with a game plan for how you’re going to prepare them in the next 1-2 days. Keep as much as you can visible and neatly organized with like items (as if you were creating your own mini market) - the decluttering and organization goes a long way in helping you maximize what you have!
A few more things
Where we share all the things we’re loving, reading, listening to, cooking, discussing and purchasing as of late.
God of the woods. We can’t remember the last time we were glued to a book like we were reading GOTW. We read this in lockstep over the span of a weekend and it was hands down, our favorite book of the year. Set in a family owned camp in the Adirondacks spanning from the 1950s to 1975, GOTW explores the mysterious disappearance of two siblings that occurs over 10 years apart. The book is thrilling and captivating, intricately and brilliantly constructed, with layers of family secrets, class politics, and varying perspectives.
Favorite fall, freezer friendly soups & stews. We stand by the fact that tip #3 (your freezer is your friend) might be our favorite/most used meal prep hack. There are a few soups and stews we always make regularly and freeze this time of year, the recipes are all in our keepers binders. Another reason to love soups = they’re great to make ahead for busy weeknights. Our go-to turkey chili, Cookie and Kate’s Best Lentil Soup, Melissa Clark’s Red Lentil Soup with Lemon, Melissa Clark’s Lemony White Bean Soup with Turkey and Greens, our Carrot ginger soup and Curried winter squash soup, Cookie & Kate’s Pasta Fagioli, Julia Turshen’s Chicken Soup From Scratch (a labor of love but so good) or this weeknight friendly lemony chicken bone broth soup that rivals the real deal.
Souper cubes. We LOVE these silicon molds for freezing cooked soups and beans (we use both the 1 cup and 2 cup versions) and the 2” ones for pesto or leftover tomato paste. Once they’re frozen, we move the soup cubed to labeled gallon zip locks.
The cheap amazon planner that changed our lives. We’re known for speaking in superlatives but bear with us - this amazon planner has been a game changer for our productivity and generally keeping our head on straight these days, and we wanted to share in case you’re in need of a new system. We first learned about it from Jen Shoop, who also shared her corresponding system for using it. We love that it allows you to divide out your to-dos throughout the course of a week, vs. having a big dump list or making a list each day. Being able to visualize and realistically map out our week on paper has been so helpful. We also keep a few of the aforementioned 3x5 sticky notes at the bottom of the page with ongoing projects / personal to dos that we want to have written done somewhere but might not be part of our plan for the week.
Our favorite, non-stick, non-toxic multipurpose pan. Non-toxic, non-stick cookware can be tricky to get right. We’ve tried a lot, and our takeaway is that even the best quality ones eventually die on us - not ideal, but the price we pay to avoid traditional teflon coating which can leach harmful chemicals like PFAs in our foods (less ideal). We are obsessed with the Always 2.0 pan from Our Place - we use it daily (at least) and it’s lasted a solid 3 years. We get the standard size and it really does it all (per the website: “braises, sears, steams, strains, sautes, fries, boils, bakes, serves, stores”) - a true workhorse!