Meal prep for families who hate meal prep
No wall of identical containers. No Sunday lost to it. Just a few things done ahead that change the whole week.
The internet's version of meal prep is twenty identical containers of chicken and rice, photographed from above, eaten joylessly by Thursday.
I have never once managed it, and I have stopped feeling bad about that. What does work is smaller and much less photogenic.
Prep components, not meals
A finished meal made on Sunday is a meal you have to want on Wednesday. A component is useful whatever you end up making.
- A pot of rice or a pan of roasted vegetables
- Onions and garlic chopped, in a box in the fridge
- Chicken cooked plain, to go into anything
- Hard-boiled eggs
- A jar of dressing or a sauce that makes dull things good
- Fruit washed and cut, at eye level in the fridge
Chopped onions in a box save you ten minutes on four separate evenings. That is the whole trick, and it is not very impressive, and it works.
Double whatever is already happening
The lowest-effort prep in existence is cooking twice as much of something you were making anyway and freezing half. Bolognese, chilli, soup, curry — all of them behave perfectly.
This costs you almost no extra time, because the work was in the chopping and the pot was already on.
Twenty minutes, not a Sunday
Pick one twenty-minute slot in the week and do two or three things from the list. That is it. Nobody needs to lose a Sunday afternoon to this.
- Put the rice on while you unpack the shopping
- Chop while something else is in the oven
- Boil the eggs during bath time
Freeze in usable sizes
The most common mistake is freezing one enormous block that has to be entirely defrosted or not at all.
Freeze flat in bags, in the portions you actually serve. Label them, because you will not remember, and a mystery brick is functionally not food.
