A beginner's guide to meal prep

If you’re short on money, it’s usually a good idea to cook most of your meals at home. If you’re short on time and energy, prepping meals in advance is one way to get this done. You may hear “meal prep” and imagine sacrificing an entire Sunday to cook up huge vats of food, but it can be much simpler than that. Meal prepping can be anything you do to prepare food you intend to eat later. “Making too much rice by accident” counts, and so does “throwing supper leftovers in the fridge”. Most recipes are geared towards feeding a family, so single people and small households often end up meal-prepping by default.

There are two major kinds of meal prep. One method is to make extra portions of meals, which is often called batch cooking, and the other is to prepare ingredients that can be recombined and eaten in various ways throughout the week. Tips and easy starter recipes for both methods are covered below.

If you’ve never tried batch cooking before, the key is to not get overly ambitious about it. An easy way to start is to pick a meal you already like to eat and simply double the recipe the next time you cook it. If you don’t mind a little repetition, you can save your extra food for lunch or dinner in the next few days. If you do mind repetition, you can freeze your second meal, and eat it at some point in the next three months. Doubling and freezing just one meal a week is a simple way to keep yourself supplied with easy, home-cooked meals that can be defrosted when cooking isn’t possible, or if groceries run low. It takes a little extra time to prep the larger amount of food, but much less than cooking (and cleaning up!) the whole thing twice.

If this way of cooking and eating works well for you, consider increasing the number of meals you’re batch cooking. If you love cooking and experimenting with food, or you just really would like to cook less during the week, then feel free to try out a batch cooking session on a day off. You can make sheet pan meals for packable lunches, or get the freezer stocked with a few good dinners. If that sounds awful to you, then stick to making extra of whatever you’re already cooking.

Pro tips:

• Always try out recipes to ensure you like them before batch-cooking them. Try to only batch-cook recipes that you enjoy. If you don’t like a meal the first time, it’s miserable to eat it again. If you want to be extra cautious, you can also try freezing a small portion to ensure your recipe keeps well too!
  
  
• If you’re batch cooking by doubling recipes, separate and refrigerate the half you want to keep right away, before serving. This will keep your planned leftovers at a safe temperature and prevent them from getting picked over at the table. 
  
  
• If you’re batch cooking for the freezer, check out our guide to freezing leftovers for ways to keep freezer food high quality and safe to eat!

Recipes that are easy to double and will hold up well in the fridge or freezer include:

• Cowboy chili
  
  
• Nanny's chicken and rice casserole
  
  
• Shepherd's pie
  
  
• Chickpea curry
  
  
• Black bean soup

Prepping ingredients instead for meals is a good option if you enjoy putting meals together on the fly, or prefer having more flexibility in what you eat. Instead of batch cooking something like a chicken casserole with rice and broccoli, an ingredient prepper may prepare chicken, rice, and broccoli separately, and then store them in the fridge or freezer. These ingredients can then be mixed up and added to meals as needed. 

Similar to batch cooking, you can prep ingredients pretty easily by making extra of whatever you’re already making; you can double a pot of beans, put extra hard-boiled eggs in the pot, or add more baked potatoes to the oven. Refrigerate or freeze as appropriate. Quick tip - beans usually freeze well, but eggs and potatoes won’t.

Some people prefer having an ingredient prepping session at the start of the week to help save time on busier work days. But remember, if spending your free time meal prepping sounds more burdensome than helpful to you, don’t do it!

Pro tips:

• If you aren’t great at using up whatever is around in the kitchen, ingredient prepping is a great way to end up with a random mish-mash of leftovers that don’t go together. Freezer instructions and refrigeration times also vary a lot from ingredient to ingredient, so if you’re not organized, it’s easy for things to go bad. A little structure or advanced planning can help with this; think about what you’re likely to do with these ingredients before you get them prepped.
  
  
• A popular formula for planning ingredient prep is to make some combination of protein, starch (like rice, grains, or potatoes), and veggies that go well together. In the example above, someone may have roasted a chicken, boiled extra rice, and chopped up an entire head of broccoli. This makes a meal of chicken, rice, and broccoli with leftovers. Over the next few days, they can use these ingredients to make stir-fry, fried rice, a grain bowl, soup, or yes, still a casserole.
  
  
• Another tactic is to prep one versatile ingredient, and then make the most of it. For example, a spaghetti sauce with ground beef keeps well in the freezer, so it’s worth it to make a double batch. Or you could use it in one week by remixing it; put it on bread to make sloppy joes, add beans and spices to make chili, put the chili on hot dogs for chili dogs, and so on.
  

Recipes:

You don't always need recipes for ingredient prepping; many people will just wash and chop up some fruit and veggies, cook a grain and a pot of beans, or boil some eggs. You can also try prepping some of the recipes below, which make versatile ingredients that can be used a variety of ways.

• Roasted vegetables
  
  
• Extended spaghetti sauce
  
  
• Black bean burgers
  
  
• Homemade yogurt
  
  
• Refried beans
  
  
• Pulled pork
  

With these tips, hopefully the meal prepping process seems more simple and clear! As always, start small and modify any of these suggestions so that they work for you.

Food is Too Expensive! was funded by the City of Saskatoon through our Healthy Yards partnership, the Cyril Capling Trust Fund of the College of Agriculture and Bioresources, and the Department of Plant Sciences. Focus group research to inform this work was collected by CHEP. Thank you all for helping us make healthy food more accessible!