Meal Prep 101

Hello! I hope you’re all having a lovely day out there.

A few weeks ago, I shared a photo on Instagram and Facebook showing the final product of my weekly meal prep. Since then, I’ve gotten a ton of questions about the process so I figured I’d put it all out there for you guys. Since I have school on the brain (always), I wanted to take you all through Meal Prep 101.

But before you come to class, you have to do your prereqs 😉

The first thing you need to do, is take a few minutes and setup a plan. Think about what the week ahead will entail (will you be spending a lot of time at home? on the road? do you have dinner/lunch dates already setup?). This gives you an idea of what you need to prepare. I usually eat 99% of my dinners at home, and take my lunch to work, so my normal planning process revolves around lunches and dinners.

From there, I’ll sometimes browse Pinterest and my own cookbooks for ideas. I’ll usually pick 1-2 lunch items, and 1-2 dinner items to make a large batch of and eat throughout the week (being okay with eating the same things a few days in a row is a huge timesaver). I’ll also list out the snack items I want to have on hand, and make sure I have my morning smoothie fixings. I’m a huge nerd, and keep a spreadsheet each week of what I want to have for each meal, linked to the Pinterest recipe (if applicable) and a description of the workout I’m going to do each day (too much?). Yeah…I don’t use Excel for real Excel things, like you know…financials and data. I use it for food. Cause what else is there? Don’t judge. If anyone is interested in seeing how I lay that out let me know and I can send you a copy!

Once I know what I want to make, it’s time to make a grocery list and get to shoppin’. Mine usually looks something like this:

Alright, now we are ready to rock and roll. You now have your plan, and you have your groceries according to what you’ll need.

For this week, this is what I have planned:

-Breakfast: Smoothies

-Snacks: Boiled Eggs, Fruit, Veggies with Hummus

-Lunch: Chicken, Quinoa, Kale Salad

-Dinner: Spaghetti Squash with Turkey Meatballs, Brussels Sprouts (can’t stop, won’t stop)

Here’s the loot for the week:

I had it all prepped in an hour, and now won’t have to spend more than a few minutes getting food together all week.

1. Heat the oven to 400 F. Sliced spaghetti squash in half, scooped out the seeds and placed on a baking sheet with coconut oil spray before popping it into the oven for about 30 minutes.

2. While the squash was in the oven, I prepared the meatballs. I didn’t use a formal recipe for this, I just combined one pound of ground turkey, one egg, 1/4 cup almond meal, 1 cup chopped onion, chopped rosemary, thyme, one clove of garlic, chopped basil, salt and pepper. Rolled into balls, then put into a glass baking dish lined with parchment before placing into the oven – these take about 25 minutes.

3. Start boiling eggs and cooking quinoa.

4. Now it’s time to cook up the chicken. I chopped up a pound of chicken breasts and began sautéing over medium heat with a teaspoon of coconut oil. Then I added a clove of garlic, paprika, chili powder, salt and pepper.

5. While the chicken was cooking I cleaned up a bit, got a clean cutting board and knife, and started chopping bell peppers to eat as a snack with hummus. Then I chopped all of my kale (I prefer it to be finely chopped) and placed into a giant container to make salads from all week.

6. Got the squash out of the oven and set it aside to cool. Around this time, the eggs and quinoa were done so I put them in containers to keep for the week, then removed the squash from the rind. The chicken and meatballs finished next.

Finished Product:

And that’s it! A super easy meal prep sesh that wasn’t overly complicated or tedious, but will set me up for a week of good meals despite my crazy schedule. I hope this is helpful!

Do you have any helpful meal prep/planning tips? If so, I want to hear about them -comment below!

xoxo,

Les