Meal Prepping: What You Need To Know To Get Started

Cooking every single day can soon become incredibly annoying! Even when you’ve got a family to feed, getting in the kitchen for an hour every evening can exhaust you and make you never want to see the stove again. This doesn’t even mention how quickly it can be to run out of ideas! 

And if you find cooking on a nightly basis one of the hardest things to manage, this is the guide for you. It’s time to start meal prepping! Meal prep goes a long way to cutting out this daily effort – you just need to cook in batches once per week. Here’s our guide to the basics you’ll need to know to get started. 

How to Get Started Meal Prepping

Some Ingredients Will Be Tricky to ‘Prep’

Ingredients that are quite naturally soft can be hard to cook up and keep in the freezer. After all, they’re likely to take on a lot of water or turn a funny color when they’re in storage. Potatoes are a good example of this, as are soft cheeses, rice, and various forms of noodles. 

Similarly, anything you have to fry up with oil, such as delicious fry bread, will also be hard to keep in the freezer for long periods of time. But don’t panic here. If every other part of the meal is prepped, you won’t have to spend long cooking up these other ingredients to go with it! 

Start with Just One Meal

Meal prepping can be overwhelming when you try to tackle all your meals at once. To stop this from getting to you, just do one meal at a time. Start with breakfast, if you’re rushed for time in the morning, lunch if you never have anything to eat in the middle of the day, or dinner if you’re experiencing the troubles listed above. Once you’re practiced in one meal, you can move on to doing two. 

Date Your Meals When Storing

If you’re putting something in the freezer for later, you’ll need to write the current date on the packaging. That’ll help you practice good food hygiene in the kitchen, as not all foods can be stored in this manner at the same time. 

Write on the top what the meal is, what’s in it, and when it was made. Depending on the type of meat, and vegetables, and the manner in which they were cooked, you can have anywhere between 3 and 12 months to use up the food. 

Switch it Up Every Few Months

It’ll get very boring to eat the same cycle of meals for weeks on end. So every 3 months or so, throw out your current meal prep calendar and make a new one. Add in different foods and flavors to give you some variety. It will also ensure your cooking skills can still get a boost every now and then! 

Meal prepping is one of the best ways to approach food. When you know the basics beforehand, it makes it super easy to get started meal prepping.