Do you find yourself constantly eating out or heating up unhealthy prepackaged food? If you’re in this boat, meal prepping is the perfect solution. With it, you make a large amount of food all at once and then portion it out to last you throughout the week. Overall, you spend less time cooking while still having nutritious food at the ready when you need it. Making food in bulk like this could still present its own challenges if you aren’t used to it, though. Take note of these ways to make meal prepping easier to minimize possible sources of frustration.
Make a Plan and List
Funny enough, the first tip you should follow is prepping for your meal prep. Find an easy-to-follow recipe or two online and look at what ingredients you will need. Think about your daily schedule and how many meals you’ll need to cover you for the week. There may be certain days where you expect to eat out with friends or family, so you won’t need to cook for those. Then, make a list of exactly what to get at the grocery store and the quantities of each item. With these steps, you won’t waste any food or time while meal prepping.
Record Meal Prep Recipes
Meal prepping might place convenience and healthiness as high priorities, but that doesn’t mean that you need to compromise on taste. Don’t settle for the simplest meals just because they’re easy to remember. Instead, try out different meal prep recipes and record those you enjoy. For instance, there are plenty of tasty Italian recipes like various pasta and chicken dishes you can choose from, which you can then easily pull up again from your growing catalog of options. Eventually, you won’t need to spend as much effort searching for something to make and the meal prepping will be more sustainable for your lifestyle in the long run.
Learn to Use Tools Well
Although repetition makes meal prepping go faster and feel more natural, you should also learn the proper techniques for using your kitchen tools. You’ll boost your efficiency this way. The most prominent example of a tool you’ll use across many recipes is a kitchen knife. A knife is an essential item that will allow you to cut vegetables, fruits, and meat into the correct sizes and shapes recipes call for. You should improve your knife skills by getting the grip right and learning the basic cutting techniques, such as dicing and julienning. Other tools, like whisks, tongs, and graters, are more straightforward to use. Still, an undeniable way to make meal prepping easier is to find out the best ways to hold and handle tools, so you can prevent accidents or injuries while preparing your meals even faster.