Seven Meal Prep Tips

Use these seven tricks to help your meal preparations this week!

READY TO USE CHICKEN

Cook large family packs of chicken breast (5+ pounds) in the slow cooker. When done, cube the meat and separate out into meal sized containers. For our family of four, I put the chicken into 3 quart sized containers. One quart size container is enough for one meal with no leftovers. If I want leftovers or I am making a large batch of soup, I will use two containers. If you live alone or don’t live with teenage boys, maybe you can make 6 smaller batches. Any recipe where you cook the chicken, then make a sauce or add other things to the pan without the chicken, are great for using cooked chicken and speeds up your weekly meal hands on time. Our favorite recipes to use already cooked chicken: Coconut Chicken Curry, Low Carb Tuscan Chicken, Chicken Pot Pie Soup, and Enchilada Casserole.

WHOLE ROAST CHICKEN

If you like to buy organic meat, you cannot beat the price of getting a whole chicken versus getting already cut pieces. If you are going to roast one chicken in the oven, why not roast two! We like to roast two and eat the dark meats and wings for our meal that evening. Then we take all the rest of the chicken and pull off all the meat. This can be saved for meals like noted above, or we save the bones and make chicken stock and then use both the meat and stock to make a chicken soup. This will make enough for at least a couple days worth of soup, so you have made 3+ meals out of 2 chickens.

PORK SHOULDER

Big hunks of meat are great for leftovers! When we roast a pork shoulder, I will pull some of what is cooked and shredded and put in quart containers for the freezer. These are then pulled out at a later time for a fast meal. We use pork shoulder for BBQ pulled pork obviously, but if you leave the meat sort of flavored plainly you can make it into other meals as well. Pulled pork tacos or quesadillas, cuban sandwiches, pork salad, just to name a few.

MARINADES

If I am making a marinade for meat, why not make two? One for now and one for the freezer. I use this specifically on two meals that I love to grill in the summer, when I would much rather be outside instead of cooking or prepping meals. The recipes are for the great chicken marinade and skirt steak fajitas. I get extra meat, cut it all up as needed and separate in the designated dishes or ziplock bags. Then mix up the marinade for each one while everything is out. Pop one in the fridge for a meal and the other in the freezer for another meal later. When I add this to my menu, I pull it out of the freezer the day before and it marinades while thawing.

ONIONS

Dice a bunch of onions and put it in a ziplock bag in the freezer. Obviously you can’t use it in any way that is raw after you freeze it, but any recipe that starts with cooking onions will work. Just one less prep item for a quick weeknight meal. Just watch out as you add them to the pan with oil - the ice will make splatters. Maybe you don’t mind cutting onions each time, but my eyes are so sensitive to the onion fumes that I can’t even see through the tears. PRO TIP: lab goggles are the best way to cut onions if this also happens to you!

SPAGHETTI SQUASH

We grow spaghetti squash in the garden, so when they are ready we have a lot at once. To spread this out, I oven roast batches of 3 squash at a time. Cut them in half in the middle (so you have the stem end and blossom end separated) and scoop out the seeds. Drizzle with a little oil and put cut side down on a parchment lined baking sheet. I fit 6 halves on one sheet. Bake at 400 degrees for at least 30-45 minutes. Check at that time to see if a fork EASILY slides into several areas of the squash half. If so, it is done and take that piece out. If not, leave it in until it is. Each squash will be done at a different time so just keep checking. Let those cool and then scrape them out into ziplock bags. I usually do 3 halves into one bag (otherwise known as 1.5 squash), but you can adjust for your favorite spaghetti squash uses or sizes of squash. I take this out the day before I want to use it and thaw it along with the meat for spaghetti squash bake.

SOUP

I love a good soup, so all winter long we have soups on repeat. The best thing is that you can just make a giant pot of soup and eat for days. I will also put soup into quart containers to pull out at a later time for lunch or a quick weeknight meal (this usually takes 2 quart containers for us). Our favorite soups: egg drop soup, chicken pot pie soup, chili, lentil soup, and hamburger soup with veggies.

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