How are you guys doing with your New Year's resolutions? We hope you're staying on track! We know that eating healthy takes thought, planning, and time. So, the PFC squad got together to help. Several of us have some meal prep hacks, tips, or tricks that we want to share to help keep you going strong with healthy, convenient meal options.
When we offer this as a solution to save time, some folks reply that they like to grocery shop and prefer to do it themselves. The whole point here is to prioritize, create efficiency, and save time for the things you love to do and need to do. We don't have to tell you that there are just so many hours in a day. This is the reality of it -grocery shopping or taking the dog for a walk, grocery shopping or hitting the gym, grocery shopping or spending time with the kids. You decide.
The fees for curbside pickup or home delivery are very reasonable, especially considering the time you will save. We love Instacart's delivery service around PFC because they will go to Aldi.
Invest in quality, portion control containers.
When you set out to meal prep, you will likely run into roadblocks like time, experience, or knowledge about nutrition and batch cooking. Don't let containers be a roadblock. Be sure to have plenty of portion control containers clean and ready. You may be drawn to the containers with multiple compartments, but you might not want all containers to get heated up. Remember those really horrible Kid's Cuisine TV dinners? And your apple sauce would get all warm with the rest of your meal? That was a real bummer. So we recommend individual containers. This set from Amazon is a great start.
Look ahead to see how many meals you actually need.
You may be tempted to go full throttle and cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the week. But you probably don't need all of those meals. Consider the week ahead before you dive in. If you're going out to eat, have a work potluck, or visiting family, you have to take those meals into account. Don't prep 21 meals if you only actually need 15.
There are so many "dump meal" recipes out there. A dump prep is probably exactly what you think. You just toss all of the ingredients into the crock pot and let it do it's slow cookin' magic. You can easily get 5 meals out of one crock pot recipe. Crock pot cooking is great for the novice who doesn't have a lot of time. Here are some of our favorite healthy slow cooker recipes.
Season meat two or three ways in one pan.
We love this one! When you're working with lean meats like chicken or fish, it can get easy to become bored of the same flavors over and over again. When you're baking your protein, you can use foil to create separate sections so you can use different spices and sauces on the same protein.
Muffin tins are great to batch cook meatloaf, mini quiches, pasta bake cups, or even plain ol' muffins. They're great to keep your portion control in check and they're easy to store, grab, and go. Here are some of our favorite healthy muffin tin meal prep ideas.
Hard boiled eggs are great for meal preppers.
Thank chickens for boiled eggs! How do we love boiled eggs? Let us count the ways -boiled eggs are extremely easy to cook and store, they last one week, eggs are very cheap, and they're packed with protein and flavor. You can keep them on hand for a snack or add them to a meal for additional protein and flavor.
Well, we hope our tips will be helpful. We're big fans of the meal prep to keep us on track, fueled up, and we love the convenience. Share your favorite meals prep hacks or recipes with the rest of the PFC community on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. See you around The Club!