Simply put, meal prepping is the act of preparing your food before you are going to eat it. I’ve been meal prepping for a little over a year and it has saved me a ton of time and money. I enjoy not having the added stress about what I’m going to cook and pack for lunch each day. I also like knowing that I’m practicing sustainable habits in the kitchen by knowingly decreasing my food waste! While I don’t consider myself an expert meal prepper in the slightest, here are some tips I have if you’re interested in getting started:
- Invest in some food storage containers!
- They can be purchased at any local grocery store or ordered on Amazon. I’d recommend getting containers of various sizes.
- Glass vs plastic? Glass containers are usually pricier (ranging around $30), but they are overall more sustainable than their plastic counterpart. However, if you’re new to meal prepping and on a college student budget, plastic containers do the job just as well!
- Pick your recipes!
- I shamelessly use Pinterest to find nearly all my recipes, but you can also just google “Meal prep” a long with your favorite foods to find an abundance of recipes on the web.
- If you’re planning on meal prepping more than one meal, pick recipes with similar ingredients. It will make your grocery visits cheaper and quicker.
- Pick a day to cook and shop!
- I personally set aside my Sunday’s to grocery shop and get all my cooking done. It’s my least busy day of the week so I’m able to set aside a few hours to meal prep for the week
If the thought of cooking and planning a full week of meals seems too daunting, don’t worry! For beginner meal preppers, choose the meal that is hardest for you to plan (for me, that’s lunch) and focus on just that for a few weeks. Meal prepping can also be as simple as chopping up your vegetables and storing them in food containers until you’re going to use them. At the end of the day, meal prepping is supposed to save you from stress, not add to it!