Weekly Meal Prep

Can you believe it’s already Thursday?!  Like I said yesterday, I could really get used to these short work weeks!

Since I had so much to talk about yesterday, I never got to mention what I did on Tuesday night when I got back to my apartment: a whole bunch of meal prep. 

I kind of have a love/hate relationship with preparing meals ahead of time.  On one hand, it makes life so much easier for the rest of the week.  Everything is already ready to go, and all you have to do is throw it together, maybe heat it up, and you’re good.  But on the other, I feel like there’s a lot more potential for waste since you may not end up eating everything you prepare.  I guess the trick is to learn as you go, because over time I would think your portion sizes would become more and more accurate.

First, I made a list of all the meals I’d be eating this week: spaghetti squash with tomatoes and ground turkey, stuffed peppers, grilled chicken salad, egg scrambles with spinach and peppers, and maybe steak and asparagus. I wasn’t sure which meal would go with which day, but having the list made it a lot easier to know what to make in general.

I started by cutting up all the chicken and steak into serving sizes and wrapped each of them so that I could freeze whatever I didn’t end up using this week. 

I cooked up the ground turkey while the plum tomatoes were sautéing in a little bit of olive oil and basil…

and then simmered both together with a little bit of water for a while. 

I also cooked up the chicken for the salad in a little bit of olive oil…

and microwaved a spaghetti squash.

I’d never cooked or eaten a spaghetti squash before, but after a little Googling I decided to go the easy route and microwave it.  I just punctured it in a bunch of places with a sharp knife and then microwaved it for ten minutes before (carefully – it’s hot!) scooping out the pulp and the scraping out the “spaghetti” insides. 

I also chopped some carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, and spinach for the chicken salads, and cut up some green peppers and spinach for the egg scrambles.  Chopping is often what takes the most time, so having all those ingredients ready will make tossing the meals together a snap. 

I boiled and stuffed a green pepper with the turkey/tomato mixture, so all I’ll have to do there is pop it in the oven (or even the microwave) when I’m ready to eat it.  I portioned the spaghetti squash + turkey/tomato mixture into three individual servings, so those were all ready to go as well. 

My fridge now looks like a Tupperware factory, but it sure is going to make eating this week very simple… and I like the sound of that!  Sometimes its easy to say eh, I don’t feel like cooking, so I’ll just grab something to eat on my way home, but when everything’s already ready, you don’t have that excuse! 

Questions:

Do you do any kind of weekly meal prep?

What are you best tips and techniques for prepping food?