08/30/2017

Quick Bite: Meal Prep Tips & Tricks

Hi Busies! If you’ve already read my Big Bite post about meal prep, you understand the basic idea that meal prepping will save you time and money. But how can you save even more time and money? Follow the tips below!

Freezing food – The quicker food freezes, the better the quality once it’s thawed. Put your cooked meals in the fridge for an hour or two before transferring to the freezer. Put a cookie sheet in the freezer for a couple of hours (while you cook), and then transfer the cooled container or bag onto the frozen cookie sheet. If you’re using plastic bags for storage, this will also help keep your frozen meals flat and stackable in the freezer. Always spread the food out as flat as possible within the container or bag to help it freeze as quickly as possible.
Thawing food – When you’re ready to eat a meal you’ve frozen, it’s best to thaw overnight in the fridge, rather than letting it sit out at room temperature. With my FREE meal prep guide, you’ll know what to thaw at the beginning of each week. Sunday night is a great time to grab whatever you plan to eat and put it in the fridge so that the meal is thawed by the time you’re ready to cook it.
Be prepared – Always read each recipe in full before you start cooking. I’m totally guilty of not doing this, but I always regret it the moment I read the words “chill for 1 hour”…you get the idea. Lots of disappointment. Especially if it involves cookies.
Make the most of your kitchen – When cooking, try to plan so that you’re doing as much double duty as possible. Sometimes this means going out of order in recipe directions, or changing the way something is cooked. For example, in my quick & easy beef stir fry, instead of sautéing the carrots and broccoli, I chop them up along with vegetables for other recipes and roast all the vegetables in the oven while I stir fry the beef (and rice cooking on another burner!). And before I even start all that, I’ve already got my Salsa Chicken going in the crock pot.
Be efficient – Along the same lines, try to prep recipes with similar ingredients at the same time. For example, balsamic chicken, blood orange chicken, and turmeric chicken kale bowl recipes all use chicken that is browned in a pan. Prep all this chicken at once and place it in individual meal containers in the fridge. While the chicken cooks, you can make the sauces in another pot/pan. That’s protein for 12 meals, all done at once!