A Beginner’s Guide To Meal Prepping
By: Star McCown ‘21
What is Meal Prep?
Meal prep is when you plan your meals and snacks for the week ahead of time, preparing your meals early on, and portioning them out for convenient meals-to-go throughout the week. Why should you try meal prepping? Well, meal prepping can help you eat balanced and nutritious meals, and exercise good portion control. You can also save money planning and making your meals ahead of time rather than eating out when you’re too busy to cook, or wasting money on groceries that end up going bad before you remember to use them. Don’t know how to cook? That’s okay! Your meal prep journey can begin with simple beginner recipes, and over time, you can level up your meal prep once you feel more confident in your cooking abilities. If meal prep sounds like something you want to try, then this blog post will help you get started on your meal prep journey.
Step 1: Choosing The Right Method
The three most common methods of meal prepping are batch cooking, ingredient preparation, and meal swaps. Choosing the method that best suits your schedule and your needs is important in order for you to be able to sustain introducing meal prep into your routine. Here’s a short description of each method:
Batch Cooking: This method is when you prepare all of your meals for the entire week in one day. The pro is that this method will save you the most time throughout your week. The cons are that it leads to less flexibility and variety in your meals and requires the most energy in one sitting.
Ingredient Preparation: This is when you prepare the ingredients for your recipes in advance, and then cook the meal with the prepared ingredients when you plan to eat it. The pros are that it allows you to enjoy the process of cooking every day without the hassle of ingredient prep, and it allows you to have fresher meals. The con is that this method is the most time consuming overall as you have to cook every day. However, it would still take up less time than not having your meals planned out.
Meal Swap: A meal swap is when you and a group of friends make a plan to get together once a week and swap meals with each other. The way it works is that each person is assigned a recipe to prep a week’s worth of meals from. The group then meets at a designated time and location to swap meals with one another. The pro is that you are able to have more variety of meals without having to spend more time prepping different meals. The con is that it depends on other people’s reliability and availability. I would not recommend this method during the pandemic, however, if you live with roommates this could be a great way for you all to bond and cook together.
Step 2: Establishing A Schedule
Once you’ve decided on the method that best suits you, it’s time to establish a meal prep schedule! If you’ve chosen batch cooking as your method, decide on what day and time every week you’ll be able to set aside about two hours for cooking all of your meals. If you’ve chosen ingredient prep as your method, set aside one hour every week for preparing your ingredients, and try to set a consistent schedule for when you are going to cook every day. If you’ve chosen to do a meal swap with friends, you will have to set aside about two hours once a week to cook all of your meals, and also decide on a day, time, and location for meeting with your group to swap your meals.
Regardless of which method you’ve chosen, make sure to choose a day and set aside an hour or two to decide on what meals you’d like to make for the week, organize your ingredient list, and make a trip to your local grocery store.
Step 3: Stocking Your Kitchen With Meal Prep Fundamentals
Another great thing about meal prepping is that it does not require any fancy or expensive kitchen equipment. All you really need is equipment that is essential to any kitchen plus good quality food storage containers. Here’s a list of required equipment and a list of recommended equipment:
Required Equipment:
Baking Sheets
Food Storage Containers (Mason jars, bento boxes, Tupperware or glass containers)
Cutting board and cooking knives
Measuring cups
A basic Cookware set
Recommended, but not required:
Instant Pot
Air Fryer
Blender
Reusable Baking Cups
Step 4: Understanding the Shelf Life and Expiration of Food
This step is extremely important so you can be mindful of how long your food will stay good to eat. It’s recommended to prep at most 5 days of food at a time, and it is best to put the meals you plan on eating for the last two days of the week in the freezer so they last longer.
Check out this resource from Feeding America for a comprehensive guide to understanding the shelf life of different foods: https://foodshare.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Food-Shelf-Life-Guide.pdf
Step 5: Finding Recipes
Now the fun part, choosing your meals for the week! There are many great resources online to find and plan out your meals, and cookbooks can also be a fun option too, if that interests you. Here’s a list of some of my favorite meal prep recipe sources:
Kitchen Stories (App)
This app has thousands of articles and recipes that are easy to navigate. When you save a recipe, the app instantly adds the ingredients to your virtual grocery list. You can also filter searches by ingredients, dietary restrictions and more.
Mealime (App)
This app allows you to plan meals around your diet, allergies and dislikes for your entire week. You can also filter by price per serving, and order ingredients through the app.
Food Network (App + Website)
This app is great if you are new to cooking, as they have videos teaching basic skills and how-tos, and they also offer virtual cooking classes. Along with instructive information, it also houses thousands of recipes.
Budgetbytes.com (Website)
This website has over 50 meal prep recipes that list the estimated cost per serving and allows you to adjust the ingredient quantities based on the number of servings you want.
If you are thinking of changing your diet, talk to your doctor or dietitian first. Overall, you know what’s best for your body and your doctor or dietitian would best be able to advise you on your body’s needs. Best of luck on your meal prep journey! You are going to do great.
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