Meal Prep Madness: My Process for a Busy Month

It seems like we’re always “too busy” to eat homemade food regularly, which means most people resort to buying their lunches 5 times a week and many Americans eat out or get take out several times a week for dinner as well.

In response to this busyness, many people practice meal prepping, which involves making lots of food all at once, packaging it into single servings, and saving it for later.  It feels silly to cook food that is specifically turned in to leftovers, but it’s also quite lovely to just grab a container from the freezer every morning before work and avoiding the $8+ lunch options near the office. 

You may be wondering why I meal prep since I’m all about getting people to enjoy spending more time in the kitchen.  But that doesn’t mean I dislike efficiency!  I have a full-time job, so my time in the evening is spent making dinner, but getting to eat homemade hot food in the middle of the day feels like a little hug at work.

Typically, I meal plan and prep my lunches one week at a time, and there are plenty of guides out there so I won’t bore you with yet another.  But this month, every weekend is jam-packed and I won’t have my precious kitchen time on Saturdays, so I had to think on a macro scale.  Like, 3 weeks macro.

Step One: Choose What You Want to Eat

I started the same way I always do, first checking what I needed to use up in my pantry, fridge, and freezer, then using my Google Calendar to jot down my ideas for lunches and dinners with links to any relevant recipes for inspiration.  From there, I made my grocery list.  Unfortunately, with 3 different lunches on deck, that list was intidimatingly long and pricey.  I backtracked a bit and chose lunches with shared ingredients and shared cooking processes… but without so much overlap that I’d run out of room on my 4-burner stove top. 

I also wanted to take advantage of all the fabulous produce of “shoulder season” – the time between the end of Summer and the truly cold nights of Fall- which influenced my selections.  I settled on:

• Zucchini-Radish Goat Cheese Pita Pizzas
• Broccoli Cheddar Soup with zucchini and carrots for extra bulk
• Lentil Soup with Brunoised Potatoes and Carrots

I’m not going to go into detail with recipes here, because that would be totally overwhelming, but I did link to the inspiration I used as a starting point.  As I always say, once you are confident in the kitchen, you will be able to better adapt to your preferences and restrictions as I did- see if you can spot where I improvised!

Step Two: Make a Game Plan

As soon as I got home from shopping at a few little farmstands and Trader Joe’s, I put away groceries as usual, but left out everything I’d need to cook.  I gathered the other pantry ingredients and some random vegetables that were about to go bad as well as a massive cutting board, multiple pots and baking pans, and a good knife and vegetable peeler.

This is also when I preheated the oven for the pizzas and began simmering the lentils. Then I took a deep breath and went through my mental game plan.  Usually, I drink kombucha while preparing my lunches, but today’s marathon called for a local seasonal beer:

Step Three: Get Something Out of Sight and Out of Mind

The pita pizzas required relatively little prep, so I tackled those first, while the lentils simmered in chicken broth.  As I was turning the local zucchini into strips with a peeler, I realized there would be some scraps (lest I also peeled my fingertips) that would do nicely as some added fiber in the broccoli cheddar soup.  The pizzas also got some sliced radishes that were about to call it quits on life in my fridge.

Step Four: Prep Other Ingredients Using One Technique at a Time

Those went in the oven and could be unattended while I started breaking down the soup vegetables.  In this case, it’s best to tackle one prep method at a time.  I peeled potatoes and carrots first to get that over with, and cleaned the peeler to be put away.

I chopped the potatoes into teeny cubes and began to sauté those in a very large pot, then julienned the carrots into little strips.  When you’re no longer scared of knives, this kind of slicing en masse is actually quite relaxing, even meditative. 

There’s a tool that looks like a vegetable peeler that makes this job very easy, but you could just slice the carrots into thin pieces.  Half went in with the potatoes, and the other half was put aside for the broccoli cheddar soup.

Since the cutting board was out anyway, the broccoli also got broken down into tiny florets and stem slices, and the remaining zucchini was turned in to small cubes.  No food waste allowed in my house.

Ding! Pizzas were ready to come out of the oven and cool.

Step Five: Start Combining the Prepped Ingredients

Around this time, the lentils were almost done, so I added them to the large pot of carrots and potatoes, which meant that pot was available for the broccoli cheddar soup.  The lentil soup simmered away to reduce and meld flavors, but otherwise, it was done.

There are about 10 minutes of downtime in the middle of the broccoli cheddar soup before adding the vegetables, so I used that time to wrap up the pizzas for the freezer.

The broccoli, carrots, and zucchini went in the soup base to simmer for about 25 minutes. 

Step Six: Start Wrapping Things Up

Meanwhile, I tidied up the kitchen, did the dishes, and portioned the lentil soup into plastic storage containers.  There was still about 15 minutes left on the clock, so I did a little prep work for dinners during the week- I’m nuts, I know.  

I made a one-bowl pizza dough that had to proof overnight (about 3 minutes and no cleanup, thanks to my kitchen scale) and put that aside.  I also prepped a carrot-top-radish-green-basil pesto using my stick blender, since I’d need the stick blender for the broccoli cheddar soup anyway.  I told you, I don’t waste food in this house!  The “produce scrap pesto” will be featured on one of my pizzas later this week- one less thing to do after work.

After blending the soup and adding the cheddar, I could breathe a huge sigh of relief.  Everything was done, aside from portioning the soup and putting everything in the freezer after it cooled a bit.

In Summary

When thinking about prepping multiple meals, try using overlapping ingredients and techniques, but don’t try to do too much at once.  Even though you are ultimately saving yourself time in the long run, it’s ok to slow down, breathe, think, and tackle just one task at a time.  Cooking should be pleasurable regardless of when you get to eat the finished product.  This whole process took exactly 2 hours and 22 minutes from the time I got home from the grocery store to the time I took this picture:

At first, you may take longer.  Sometimes you take on too much, and you end up on the floor of the kitchen crying because you forgot what order to do things in and burnt a loaf of bread (I mean, no, I’ve never done that…).  It takes practice and planning.  A good beverage and fun music help.  Start small, with just one lunch idea at a time, then build to making more recipes at once, if you need to.  I promise, the feeling of having a freezer full of nourishing meals is reward enough.

As for the benefits, well, those are the exact inverse of the downsides of eating out for lunches.  I spent an average of $3.30 per serving on these meals, versus the minimum $8 sandwich-with-no-sides at a café.  In fact, because I used overlapping ingredients in these meals as well as in dinners throughout the week (i.e. the pesto from the vegetable tops and the mozzarella from the pizzas), I came in well under the average weekly food costs for a family of two- not to mention that I made over 3 week’s worth of lunches, rather than one! 

Side note: all these recipes are vegetarian, which was unintentional but made things cheaper, and I didn’t have to worry about cross contamination.  For those of you who think buying local is more expensive, with smart purchases I ended up spending $30 less than I would have at my local grocery store on similar ingredients , and that includes a heritage chicken and 2 lbs of grass-fed short ribs for dinners this week.  And I got to hang out with my buddies at the farmstands.

On top of the monetary savings, I also got to tailor these recipes exactly to my tastes and nutritional preferences.  And I don’t have to make a sandwich every night when I just want to relax, or stand in line at a restaurant when I could be using my lunch hour for something more worthwhile.

I think it’s safe to say that the time spent making “deliberate leftovers” is valuable.  Let me know about your experiences, troubles, and tips- I’d love to hear it all.