My Weekly Meal Prep Routine
The foods I cook every week for fast, healthy meals (plus my preferred recipes/methods for each!).
Hello and Happy Thursday! My kids are home today on a “snow day” (with virtually no snow on the ground, but apparently the roads will be bad today) and so I’m re-routing my plans of working, exercising and cleaning to crafting with the kids, baking (sourdough and cookies), and rehearsing for my eldest’s upcoming talent show.
This is one of those instances where I am grateful to have some food in the fridge, ready to go, since my kids practically break out into hives when they sense that I need to be productive. I can be present with them and tend to their needs without worrying about being in the kitchen for any extended period of time. I don’t have a formal meal prep process (meaning, I don’t spend entire Sundays cooking for hours and hours and putting everything into perfectly labeled jars and containers), but rather make the same meal “building blocks” every week as I have the time, preferably while multitasking. That could mean throwing in a tray of roasted tofu while I’m catching up on emails, or making enough broccoli for the entire week when I already have the cutting board and pots out to make dinner on Monday. These are foods that I know a) everyone will eat b) aren’t labor intensive to prepare and c) can be used in a bunch of different ways. They’re the things that I throw into my grocery cart on auto-pilot, so I always have them on hand.
These are my tried-and-true, can’t live without them staples, and I’ve included my “recipes”/methods for preparing each of them, too. Some weeks, I’ll mix things up and add to this list with some baked sweet potatoes, a pot of grains, or a yummy sauce/pesto to use throughout the week. You can add/subtract to your weekly prep list based on your family’s needs and preferences.
