I’ve tried meal prepping, cooking for hours like that is difficult. I can usually make it work on weekends, but sometimes I just dread it and can’t get through it.
I need to figure out what meals to eat for a week, which is already tough to do. I need to make a list of ingredients, go to the grocery store, buy all this shit, come home and spend hours cooking lunches and dinners.
Its exhausting.
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How do you feed yourself? Are people going to the grocery store 3 or 4 times a week and cooking every night? That sounds even worse to me.
This isn’t even mentioning that my partner is kind of a picky eater and doesn’t like to repeat meals.
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I’d love to hear from people who just don’t think this is a difficult task, and still manage to eat a balanced meal with vegetables and the works, more than just a bowl of pasta every night.
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We tried Hello Fresh for a while. It was still quite a pain to choose the meals every week, and they were sending us the wrong stuff often enough that we stopped using it.
15 comments
We meal prep for the week
Would you consider eating the same meal 5/7days? I’d cook a bunch of chicken, get a stir fry mix and some cooked rice in packets and eat stir fry with whatever sauce I decide that day. Done in a few minutes and minimal clean up as only one pan. Last thing I want to do when I get home is to have to make another decision.
Make breakfast and lunch a default meal that gets repeated. For me its porridge +whatever fruit is around, then chicken wraps for lunch. Easy, fast, no planning and little cleanup.
Dinner- make a plan for the week and get all the ingredients on the weekend. Sounds like you are doing all the work. If your partner is the picky eater ask them to help out by choosing the meals and making the shopping list together. A shelf full of cook books/magazines really makes a difference here.
It definately sucks, especially if you have to take other people’s eating habits into consideration but it can be streamlined a bit.
Breakfast 5-7 days a week for me is a mix of oatmeal, chia, flaxseed, hempseed, mixed nuts, almond milk, cocoa powder, protein powder and frozen berries. I can buy and hoard all these ingredients for a long time and it’s incredibly healthy. I pre-mix some of the ingredients together every month or two so that it’s easy to throw together in the morning and I never run out unexpectedly.
That takes care of 1 meal every day for me which is very helpful. Also because it’s so healthy I can be more lenient with my other meals if I want. It does get boring but you can always switch it up anytime you feel like it.
I typically go to the grocery store once a week. Meal prepping my lunches is the meal I spend the most time on. You may want to consider investing in a slow cooker or instant pot. Yes a slow cooker takes time, but it’s NOT labor intensive.
**Breakfast:** avocado toast, eggs and toast or oatmeal. (Easy)
**Lunch:** I meal prep my lunches. These meals range from soups, stews, pizza, ceviche, etc. Options are limitless. I use a slow cooker when I’m lazy. (Moderate)
**Typical Dinner:** I’ve been on a burrito kick. Sometimes I’ll have pasta, cheese and crackers, salad/veggies. (Easy).
I step it up when my girlfriend comes over for dinner. I’ll typically make a fish or shrimp dish for the two of us.
We have a couple of standard meals that we make on the reg. One thing we make every week is [Didi Emmons’ Smokin’ Beans](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/199103.The_Vegetarian_Planet) recipe, which makes upwards of six burittos, which is enough for three nights of food. We also make other meals that can be reheated as lunches the next day (dal/chickpea curries and other ricey dishes). For the foregoing, we have a 3kg bag of dried black beans that needs replenishing once every couple of months, a 5kg bag of rice that lasts half a year, a 2kg bag of lentils that also lasts for ages. All we need to do is buy 4-5 onions, some garlic, once a week, plus have a good supply of spices.
We supplement these with burgers/fries/salad night, big pots of soup that last days, and usually once a week have a “special” meal that requires a special trip, like grilled salmo.n w/ taters and beans
Who says you have to have 3 meals a day? A lot of people do time-restricted eating and skip breakfast or evening meal (I find breakfast much easier to skip). Or just have a smoothie in the morning.
I eat mostly raw vegan. Which is really easy to prepare.
Use this as an opportunity to consider eating more healthily.
I eat two meals a day. One of which is cooked. Perfectly fine.
If I do eat breakfast it’s just toast or cereal.
Lunch is usually left overs from the night before.
Supper is really the only meal we plan. Just make sure there’s enough for left overs.
I am SAHM at the moment (have been since 2017 actually). I used to love cooking, but with kids in the house… It’s crazy all the time. I grew up eating cooked meal once a day and I do the same now too. So basically I only cook for lunch. Lunch is always a hot dish, sometimes I make soup too. But for breakfast and dinner (supper) we eat something simple. Cereal, muesli, oatmeal for breakfast usually (no one is a big eater early in the morning in the family). On the weekend I sometimes make French toast with bacon because there is no hurry, no work, no early rising. For dinner everybody can choose something easy: scrambled eggs, toast, different type of hot sandwiches (either made in the owen or pressed), simple sandwich, etc.
There are foods that can be varied so you eat the same but it’s not the same. Eg. I made chicken soup and I put chicken breast and thighs (I hope this is the correct word) in it. Once the soup was done I took out the meat, seasoned it and put it in the oven with veggies. Next day I sliced up the left over meat, got some salad, made tzatziki dressing and made gyross (in pita). Same can be done with tortilla.
Make more batches of Bolognai sauce amd freeze some. You can make spaghetti and lasagne with the same sauce.
Make chili. Next day the leftovers can be put in a tortilla thing, fold it, put graded cheese on it amd put it in the owen.
Creativity is a must. I hate it, because I can eat the same thing for days, but my husband and the toddlers don’t really like it.
I also buy a bunch of meat (different types) at once, slice or dice them, then I weigh them and put them in the freezer in batches. The weight and meat type is written on them and as it’s already prepped it will defrost under an hour.
I used to buy sandwich ingredients and store them at work. I would then make a sandwich for lunch, every day, and just choose the things I wanted in it in the moment.
See if there’s a fully cooked meal delivery service in your area. Not referring to national chains that ship cooked meals, but locally owned chef run businesses.
I used to have dinners for the week delivered. It was awesome – healthier than eating out and they had good variety as well.
The meal planning is the hard part, I don’t deny. But that’s likely because I’ve only really been cooking 100% of my food for a few years & my repetoire of recipes is still a bit thin.
I shop once every 3 weeks. I visit three different stores (it was five before the pandemic). One of them does curbside pickup, which, combined with an easy-to-build Amazon shopping list , reduces the time this takes to approximately 90 minutes (EDIT: this does not include meal planning, making the lists, and placing the curbside order; it does include travel time because 2 of the 3 stores are adjacent, and the 3rd is only 5 minutes away from them). Without the curbside pickup, the whole operation was taking an entire morning, roughly 4 hours start-to-finish until everything was put away. That was untenable, even only doing it once every 3 weeks.
I tend to cook (dinner) twice a week. I make meals of 4 portions or more at once. I tend to make 2 of them back-to-back, eating one of each right away, and then alternating the remaining 6 so I don’t eat the same thing every night for the rest of the week (plus). There’s some variation in this, like just grilling up a sausage on a roll with some oven fries as a breather, meals that stretch further (soup) or not as far (pasta) in terms of leftover days.
Lunch is 100% of the time a sandwich, can of soup, or other, simple stick-it-in-the-toaster-oven type deal (hot dog, chicken patty melt, etc.). But most of the time it’s a sandwich + chips/crackers + fruit/raw veg.
Breakfast is usually cereal (almond milk; I get enough saturated fat elsewhere), bagels, or frozen waffles. Eggs and homemade “mcmuffins” happen, but only on special occasions or “big days” when I know I’m working through lunch.
I both benefit and suffer from having to only feed one person. With more people, the shopping is easier and the variety is greater, but the leftovers don’t last as long and you’d have to cook more. Ideally, in a multi-person household, one person doesn’t cook 100% of the time…
Once upon a time, half of a couple would stay at home and take on responsibility for that job full time, and living wages would facilitate this. (In the past, traditionally women would do this job. No, I’m not saying that it aught be women. Men could do it too)
Now your household, with both adults working, is putting out twice the work to industry, but where are the resources to live? Well, you have the weekend, time where you are supposed to relax and recharge, but you’re looking for ways to merely keep up.
You’re not alone. This is fucked up.
Food prep and eating the same thing most days a a week