Meal Prepping Hacks

Meal prepping hacks can save you time, money, and keep you on your meal plan for longer. There are a lot of tips and tricks that you pick up along the way so we want to share them with you to assist in your meal prepping endeavors. They’re simple but take time to work into your routine so you’ll get better as you get more experience.

When you first get into meal prepping, it’s common to want to make massive meals that you portion out into an entire week’s worth of breakfast, lunch and dinners. Take it slow at first and discover recipes that you enjoy, want to eat over and over again, and can handle reheating. A big discouragement early on in your meal prepping is throwing out half of what you make because you get bored of it, don’t like it as much as you thought or it goes bad. Work into a routine with a repertoire of great meal prepping recipes.

This is simple but it can make a world of difference when you’re meal prepping a lot of meals, either for yourself or for your family. Keep your fridge organized. Organize your meals, ingredients, and components so that you can keep track of your timeline, meal order, and cooking schedule. This helps avoid food waste which is discouraging in meal prep since it just wastes time and money. The opposite of your goals. Go left to right for the most recently cooked or front to back remembering “First In, First Out”. Don’t bury your older meals with newer meals up front. It’ll get confusing and make it a hassle in the mornings when you’re running out the door to work.

Also, as we always say at Prep Yo Self, label your containers. Once you start stacking meals and meal components in your fridge and freezer you will lose track of what’s what. Keep yourself motivated by staying organized.

This is probably the toughest meal prepping hack to get right. Do your best to stick to recipes that work well for meal prepping. That means that the meal can be portioned out, freezes well, reheats well, and most importantly can be diversified. Some meals require specific storage arrangements while others can easily be stored in a single container. Try out different recipes and you’ll soon discover meals that you enjoy, can cook easily, and are delicious.

This is the most common meal prepping hack, and for good reason. Choose your recipes, make a list of the ingredients that you need and the amounts. This can help you design a meal prepping plan that uses the same ingredients to avoid food waste. This can also help you save money by avoiding unnecessary grocery purchases and by selecting recipes with ingredients that are affordable. Sometimes this means buying seasonal ingredients so pay attention to what you can actually find at your grocery store before picking recipes if you can.

Meal prepping works best with a plan. From the recipes that you choose to the grocery store trip, a schedule can keep you on track and running out of prepped food for the week or making too much. Portioning food out and scheduling which meal is for which day can also help you balance your nutrition and avoid burning out on the same recipes over and over again.

One of the best meal prepping hacks is making sauces that work for many different recipes. A good sauce can transform a meal. If the sauce can be frozen or lasts a long time, this is a great way to improve your meals’ flavors and meal prep cooking time. Tomato sauces go great on a variety of pastas, a simple vinaigrette is a great salad dressing or chicken and roasted veggies sauce. These simple additions to your meal elevates the flavor and speeds up the prep time by removing a component that you have to make every time. Pull a jar from the fridge, pour some on top and you’ve created a whole new dish.

Proteins are easy to mix and match. Think about your vegetable choices and how you can use them for different recipes. This makes grocery shopping easier and cheaper. It also gives you the flexibility to mix up your routine mid week if you find yourself getting bored of a recipe. Try experimenting with recipes and switching out the ingredients in the list for ingredients that you know you have and like.

Preparing your vegetables ahead of the cook can speed up the process later. Especially if you’re planning to cook a meal in the middle of the week. Get your vegetables cleaned, chopped, or anything else that you can do ahead of time so you will be more motivated to actually cook the meal on a Wednesday night after a long day.

This meal prepping hack can save you a lot of time and keep you on your routine when you find yourself too busy or tired to cook an entire feast. Use frozen bagged vegetables and fruits. They will keep for much longer, are generally cheaper, and if you know how to reheat them, taste just as good as fresh fruits and veggies. Bagged broccoli, carrots, pineapples, berries. These are all great choices and can be dropped into a blender for a quick and nutritious smoothie.

Also don’t forget about the offerings at your local grocery store. If they have rotisserie chickens or a deli section, use the premade options. It’s not as cheap or sometimes as healthy but it’s better than breaking your routine and eating out. It can also help you discover new recipes if you’re not comfortable cooking a certain ingredient.

Pressure cookers, crock pots, air fryers, and traditional ovens are all great choices. These appliances are here to make your life easier. They can help make cooking easier, faster and in some cases improve your bulk cooking options.

A great meal prepping hack is to look for “One Pan” or “One Pot” recipes. These recipes tend to be delicious, easy to learn, and most importantly, easy to clean up. Throw some chicken and veggies on a sheet pan with a drizzle of olive oil and 40 minutes later you can dinner for a few days. The best part is that the clean up is minimal. A big part of meal prepping is to be more efficient with your time and finding hacks to decrease the boring steps in the kitchen make cooking more fun.

Mixed smoothies only last for so long before they start to separate and go bad. The blended veggies and fruits go bad so much quicker. The solution is to prepare the smoothie mixes beforehand but don’t blend until you’re ready to drink it. This also helps with portion control.

The last of the meal prepping hacks is a great way to store your premade salads to retain freshness. When you’re adding your salad to your food storage containers, add the dressing first. This way the dressing rests at the bottom and the rest of the ingredients can go on top. This prevents the vegetables and other components from going soggy as quickly and it’s easy to shake it up right before eating for a fresh, tossed salad.

Meal prepping hacks can make a big difference in your enjoyment of the food and greatly increase the efficiency. Both of those are more likely to make you stick with your schedule more often and for longer.