Contents
What are the best meal prep recipes for the week ahead?
Tropical Chicken Cauliflower Rice Bowls – This tropical favorite is a delicious and healthy dinner with tons of flavor! You can substitute regular rice for the cauliflower rice if desired. —Bethany DiCarlo, Harleysville, Pennsylvania Get Recipe 2 / 50
Näytä koko vastaus
What is meal prep?
Start with a grocery list – Once you have built out the ideas for some meals, prepare your grocery list and go load up on the foods you are going to cook. And by all means do load up when logical to do so: many of the best foods for meal prepping have very long, stable shelf lives, such as rice and other grains, beans, oils, and so on, whereas other foods can be frozen for long periods of time.
- Whereas meal prep will save you time each and every day, planning carefully and doing a large grocery shopping will also save you time by reducing the number of trips you need to make to the store.
- Finally, on the day when you will do all your meal prep work itself, take a tip from professional chefs and practice proper “mise en place,” which is French and essentially means “everything in its place.” That means having your cooking tools out and at the ready, your ingredients measured and prepared, and your meal prep containers at the ready for once a given foodstuff is ready to be stored away.
And make sure you put your kitchen to best use, too. If certain foods can be cooked on the stove or in the oven, for example, opt for the stove, where you can set multiple burners to different heats and enjoy maximum efficiency, leaving the oven free for things that must be roasted or baked.
- Speed up thawing with the microwave when safe, turn to food processors to help with mincing or chopping, and make the meal prep a whole family affair when you can, assigning everyone in the household a role.
- A prepped meal can mean a lot of different things.
- A sandwich you make one day to eat for lunch on the next absolutely counts.
So do a container loaded with pre-portioned chopped fruits and nuts set beside a bottle of almond milk all of which will be quickly blended up into a breakfast smoothie. And so too does a dinner prepared ahead of time then tucked into a glass baking dish that need only be popped into a hot oven count as a prepped meal.
- Meal prep does not mean that you complete each and every single step of a meal ahead of time, but rather it means that you take care of every step you can logically complete ahead of time, leaving yourself with minimal needed effort prior to a given meal itself.
- So while a meal that’s 100% ready to go – like that sandwich or a wrap or a hearty salad – might be great, it’s not the be all and end all of meal prep.
Another great prepped meal approach is to fully cook a meal that will then need only a quick zap in the microwave to be ready and taste fresh. You can think of it as a healthy homemade take on the TV dinner.
Näytä koko vastaus
Why should I Prep my meals ahead of time?
You will reduce stress – When you prep meals ahead of time, the worry about what you are going to eat and when you will find the time to make that lunch or this dinner are simply gone. You can count on having healthy food ready to enjoy and can devote your time, energy, and attention to work, family, hobbies, and really anything else that you want, because you’ll have the food covered.
Näytä koko vastaus
Do meal prep meals have to be reheated?
A Few Notes on Meal Prep Safety – When it comes to preparing foods that will be not only tasty but also safe to eat, the person who meal preps needs to have a bit more consideration than the person who will be eating their meal immediately thereafter.
A food should only be reheated once after it has been warmed, for example, so if you thaw a food to cook it then chill it in a prepped meal, it must be eaten or discarded the next time it’s heated. There are no leftovers with meal prep, in other words. If you freeze your prepped meals and then thaw them ahead of eating, make sure you only thaw them out a maximum of 24 hours before you will consume the foods.
And whenever possible, let foods thaw in the fridge, not at room temperature. When you reheat a food, it needs to return to a food safe temperature; use 165º Fahrenheit as a good standard for food safety, that being the temperature to which poultry and well-done red meat needs to be cooked – and also a safe bet for non-meat foods.
It’s also a good idea to label your food prep containers or to keep notes on what you packaged and when so you don’t end up eating something potentially past its safety date. And finally, make sure to use the right food storage containers. Not all plastic bags are fit for use in the freezer and some containers may risk cracking if frozen, not all containers are suitable for use in the microwave or oven, and so on.
Follow logical food safety protocols and keep yourself safe.
Näytä koko vastaus
