I have what can best be described as an ambivalent relationship with cooking. I’m not wholly opposed to it, nor am I that person that loves spending every moment of their spare time either looking up new recipes to try and eventually trying those recipes.
I will look up new recipes when the mood strikes and, only after doing my due diligence, will I even think about buying the ingredients to try it. If it works out, then it gets added to my meal prep plan.
Having said that, when it comes to day-to-day meals, I don’t want to spend too much time in the kitchen to create something that tastes ‘fresh off the stove’. This has led me to what I’ve heard described as the ‘ingredient prep’ style of meal prep, where, instead of prepping whole meals or meal components in advance, you prep ingredients and just use what’s needed.
My Meal Structure
When I’m at home, my meals usually look a little something like this:
- Breakfast: strawberry overnight oats.
- Lunch: rice plate with a protien and side salad
- Dinner: savoury muffin with fruit (usually a banana)
At first glance, it looks like a rather light set of meals. And you’d be right in thinking that. The reason for this is that I work from home most of the month and I find that I don’t get hungry that easily. It is also the reason why I’ve made lunch my main meal of the day, since I’m far more likely to get up and move around that time.
The goal isn’t to make every meal identical or perfect; it’s to have a basic structure that I can reliably work with.
My Grocery Shop
Below is a list of what I normally buy, along with how much I would purchase each time.
Dairy
- UHT skim milk. 2 x 1L cartons.
- Greek style yoghurt. 1 x 1kg tub.
- Shredded cheese. 1 x 250g pack.
Protein
- Chicken mince. 1 x 1kg pack.
- Fried tofu puffs. 1 pack.
- Chicken eggs. 1 x 12 pack.
Fresh Produce
- Cabbage. 1/2 head.
- Carrots. 2 very thiccc ones.
- Apples. 5.
- Garlic. 1 bulk pack.
Freezer Goods
- Frozen strawberries. 1 x 1kg pack.
- Chicken chippees. 1 pack.
Pantry
- Rolled oats. 1 x 1.5kg pack.
- Chia seeds. 1 x 1kg pack.
- Honey. 1 x 1kg tub.
- Vanilla extract. 1 x 100ml bottle.
- Rice. 1 massive sack.
- Gewürzhaus’s Umami Blend. 80g.
- Amoy Gold Label Light Soy Sauce.
- Hellman’s mayonnaise. 1 x 400g jar.
- Apple cider vinegar. 1 x 1L bottle.
- Sugar. 1 x 1kg pack.
- Celery salt. 1 small jar.
- Dijon mustard. 1 x 100g jar.
- Plain flour. 1 x 1kg pack.
- Wholemeal flour. 1 x 1kg pack.
- Cornmeal. 2 x 500g packs.
- Baking powder.
- Baking soda.
- Salt. 1 x 1kg pack.
Prepping The Meals
Strawberry Overnight Oats
This is one of the most straightforward recipes to prep. Every third day, I will make a new batch of oats, since each batch yields 3 Anna-sized serves. If the 3rd day should fall on a Saturday or a work-from-office day, then the new batch will be made on day 2.
Each batch consists of:
- 1 cup rolled oats
- 2 tablespoons chia seeds
- 1 cup skim milk
- 2 very large tablespoons of yoghurt. I use the same kind of spoon that I eat with. The combined amount of yoghurt works out to be around 1/4 cup-ish.
- About 1/4 cup honey. I use a mini whisk as a honey dipper. 2 whisks’ worth of honey is usually enough.
- About 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. I use the cap on the bottle to measure it out. 2 caps is enough for 1 batch.
- 1 heaping cup of frozen strawberries.
To make the overnight oats, I’ll blend everything but the oats and chia seeds together. I’ll then add in the rolled oats and chia seeds, before lettng it rest in the fridge for a few hours to firm up and make it easier to divide between the tupperware containers.
Rice Plates
The rice is cooked in bulk on an as-needed basis. 3 cups of uncooked rice yields enough cooked rice for about 5 lunches, including days where I’d be hungrier than I normally would be.
The chicken mince gets divided into 10 portions of 100g each. Each portion is then frozen. When I want to have chicken mince as the protein component of my rice plate, I’d move the portion of chicken mince from the freezer to the fridge the day before to defrost.
The garlic gets blitzed in a food processor, before being divided between snack-size ziploc bags, flattened and scored into individual portions.
When I’m ready for lunch, I will saute the portion of mince with a portion of garlic and whatever flavouring I feel like that day.
If I felt like having eggs instead, I would hard-boil them.
The side salads always start with a base of pickled cabbage and carrots.I use a decently-sized half head of cabbage and 2 very thicc carrots for each batch, which is usually good for about 2 weeks. The cabbage and carrots are shredded into short-ish lengths (think roughly the length of a credit card). For the pickling liquid, I use the simple formula of 1 part sugar, 2 parts vinegar, 2 parts water. To dissolve the sugar more easily, the water is always hot water. This step is done just after I’ve finished salting the shredded cabbage and carrots so that by the time the sugar solution is completely cool, the cabbage and carrots should have yielded enough liquid.
When it’s lunchtime, I’d rinse off the pickling liquid from about a 1/2 cup’s worth of pickled base, add my add-ons of the moment and 2 tablespoons of the dressing, which follows RecipeTin Eats’ recipe.
If I’m feeling a bit peckish, I’ll have a bit of prepped soy sauce on the side.
Savoury Muffins
I started making savoury muffins after deciding that I wanted my light dinners to not be completely devoid of nutrition. I’ve been using Yummy Toddler Food’s recipe for the last couple of batches and each one has turned out great. Each batch yields 12 standard size muffins.
Once the muffins are completely cooled, then are place in a freezer Ziploc. When I know I’ll need a light dinner, I’ll move one muffin from the freezer to the fridge to defrost the night before. From there, it’s 20-30 seconds in the microwave before it’s ready to eat.
Final Thoughts (for now)
When I first started meal prepping, I thought that I was going to be that person who could happily exist on pre-cooked meals. While it did drastically cut down the overall cooking time, I quickly learned that having to reheat meals resulted in food that I didn’t always look forward to eating. Specifically, it lacked the “just cooked” factor that I like. Ingredient prepping felt like the most natural compromise.
Only ‘properly’ cooking one meal (lunch) has satisfied the cooking itch without having to spend an hour in the kitchen before every meal.
These days, when it comes to grocery shopping, I always look for ingredients that can be used across multiple recipes. For example, I use Greek-style yoghurt in both my coleslaw dressing and overnight oats. It’s a small thing, but it helps reduce both waste and cost.
