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Nutrition How much time do you spend in meal prep?

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steve-in-kville

steve-in-kville

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So far, I've been doing meal prep just twice a week: Sunday mornings or evenings depending, and usually again Wednesday. I consume a lot of hardboiled eggs, fried bacon and fresh fruit and veggies. Only thing I make daily are my smoothies, typically my breakfast smoothie that keeps me more/less satisfied until late morning. The only cooked meal I really sit down to is dinner (or supper depending where you're from!) with the family. Otherwise I sorta just snack all day on eggs, bananas and the occasional strip of bacon. I let my body determine what I need at the moment.

I feel I'm about as streamlined as I can get and it doesn't interfere with the family cooking and meals.
 
I try to cook 4-6lbs of steak at a time to get me through a few days. Then I just cook eggs when I want them (pretty quick).
I worked in kitchens a lot of my life and feel like an expert when it comes to big batch cooking. My diet is pretty simple at this point but when I was doing a more keto/paleo kind of diet I had it down to two days. Sunday and Thursday. I don’t mind eating the same stuff for a few days. Between meal prepping two days and throwing some sort of dish in the slow cooker it was really helpful and pretty streamlined.
I could not imagine cooking full meals every night like my mom did growing up. But she also worked in kitchens her ENTIRE life and was a beast when it came to efficiency and cleaning as you go.
 
IMayAgainKnowChris said:
I could not imagine cooking full meals every night like my mom did growing up. But she also worked in kitchens her ENTIRE life and was a beast when it came to efficiency and cleaning as you go.
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We have a large family and when everyone was still at home my wife was a superhero when it came to making meals every night! I did (and still do) the bulk of the cooking on the weekends and the meal planning and grocery lists could get insane at times...
 
steve-in-kville said:
We have a large family and when everyone was still at home my wife was a superhero when it came to making meals every night! I did (and still do) the bulk of the cooking on the weekends and the meal planning and grocery lists could get insane at times...
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This post gave me a nice shot of nostalgia, from around 50 years ago. Five kids, mom was a high school teacher, generally in charge of dinner during the week and dad cooked and did the shopping on the weekends. I can remember a sea of grocery bags in the back of the station wagon, which to a young kid seemed to take two hours to get inside the house and put away.
 
Don Fairbanks said:
This post gave me a nice shot of nostalgia, from around 50 years ago. Five kids, mom was a high school teacher, generally in charge of dinner during the week and dad cooked and did the shopping on the weekends. I can remember a sea of grocery bags in the back of the station wagon, which to a young kid seemed to take two hours to get inside the house and put away.
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Every father put in that situation soon learns that slow-cookers are your friend!
 
Don Fairbanks said:
This post gave me a nice shot of nostalgia, from around 50 years ago. Five kids, mom was a high school teacher, generally in charge of dinner during the week and dad cooked and did the shopping on the weekends. I can remember a sea of grocery bags in the back of the station wagon, which to a young kid seemed to take two hours to get inside the house and put away.
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I was always the kid w 10 bags up each arm and two around my neck. Actually I still am. More than one trip and you’re slacking.
 
We don't focus on food prep in our house much. We both work, and sometimes dinner is leftovers of whatever we had a day or two earlier, sometimes it's takeout, sometimes we don't get to eat together, and so it goes.

Yesterday's dinner: my wife had made bulgogi (Korean seasoned) pork tenderloin last week sometime and we had leftovers in a container. We also had leftover rice in a container. We chopped up a few onions and a couple of big orange peppers, sauteed for a while in olive oil with a bit of salt and pepper and a few cloves of fresh garlic. Erstwhile we put some water and some soy-sauce-like things on the rice, mushed it up with our fingers, and warmed it a little in the microwave to encourage the liquid to get into the rice, which was kind of dry.

Dump the rice into the skillet with the onions and peppers, warm/sautee a bit more, season a bit more, add the pork, leave that long enough to warm up a bit, then serve with chopped scallions, parsley, and cilantro on top. My wife and I cooked together, and it was a pretty yummy result.

Nutritional breakdown - unknown. My point is that we used a couple of different leftovers and a few fresh ingredients to make a tasty dinner.

NB: Neither of us is Korean or has ever visited Korea, but if you haven't had bulgogi, you're missing something, and it's just a matter of having the right seasonings to be able to make it at home. We are fortunate to have two excellent and inexpensive Korean restaurants in our little town here in NJ and learned about bulgogi first by having it as take-out.

We keep a few things in the freezer most of the time: breaded chicken tenders; breakfast-type sausages; ground grass-fed beef. And in the fridge or the pantry, we try to keep fresh parsley, fresh cilantro, some onions, and some peppers. And rice which we make in an Instant Pot. With those things, you can create a whole lot of tasty things to eat. Dry pasta sometimes instead of rice, sometimes cheese and/or tomato sauce with the protein and pasta. And salad makings - one or two kinds of argula/lettuce/kale, cucumbers, tomatoes.

-S-
 
Steve Freides said:
We don't focus on food prep in our house much. We both work, and sometimes dinner is leftovers of whatever we had a day or two earlier, sometimes it's takeout, sometimes we don't get to eat together, and so it goes.

Yesterday's dinner: my wife had made bulgogi (Korean seasoned) pork tenderloin last week sometime and we had leftovers in a container. We also had leftover rice in a container. We chopped up a few onions and a couple of big orange peppers, sauteed for a while in olive oil with a bit of salt and pepper and a few cloves of fresh garlic. Erstwhile we put some water and some soy-sauce-like things on the rice, mushed it up with our fingers, and warmed it a little in the microwave to encourage the liquid to get into the rice, which was kind of dry.

Dump the rice into the skillet with the onions and peppers, warm/sautee a bit more, season a bit more, add the pork, leave that long enough to warm up a bit, then serve with chopped scallions, parsley, and cilantro on top. My wife and I cooked together, and it was a pretty yummy result.

Nutritional breakdown - unknown. My point is that we used a couple of different leftovers and a few fresh ingredients to make a tasty dinner.

NB: Neither of us is Korean or has ever visited Korea, but if you haven't had bulgogi, you're missing something, and it's just a matter of having the right seasonings to be able to make it at home. We are fortunate to have two excellent and inexpensive Korean restaurants in our little town here in NJ and learned about bulgogi first by having it as take-out.

We keep a few things in the freezer most of the time: breaded chicken tenders; breakfast-type sausages; ground grass-fed beef. And in the fridge or the pantry, we try to keep fresh parsley, fresh cilantro, some onions, and some peppers. And rice which we make in an Instant Pot. With those things, you can create a whole lot of tasty things to eat. Dry pasta sometimes instead of rice, sometimes cheese and/or tomato sauce with the protein and pasta. And salad makings - one or two kinds of argula/lettuce/kale, cucumbers, tomatoes.

-S-
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Yes lawd. I’ve eaten bulgogi with our KATUSA friends near the DMZ almost daily back in my 2d infantry daze. Endorsed.
 
GaryT said:
Yes lawd. I’ve eaten bulgogi with our KATUSA friends near the DMZ almost daily back in my 2d infantry daze. Endorsed.
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Me too, loved the food in Korea. And near 2ID, there used to be this awesome place in Uijeongbu, Mr. Cho's chicken cheese ramen... legendary.
 
For a while I was spending about 4 hours on Sunday and 2 on Wednesday to cook meals for everyone for the week (this included measuring everything and portioning it for two people with different macro needs). I was using an app called MealPrepPro that excelled at planning, shopping, and cooking. Unfortunately I got kind of bored eating out of Tupperware for every meal. And wrapping a weeks worth of breakfast burritos all at once sucks.

More recently I’ve been experimenting with a different approach where I’m using what I learned cooking in a restaurant in high school. I’ll do as much prep work as I can on sundays (let the grocery store help out as much as possible) and then do “service” for dinner. Lunch is leftovers and breakfast is simple eggs, egg whites, toast/beans, plus salsa/kimchi. I’m working on reducing the number of ingredients and steps for each dish. It feels more efficient to me. I’ll spend maybe 20 minutes cooking dinner every night. Usually done in one pan or on the grill to minimize dishes.

So a week of meals looks like
Sun: tortilla chicken soup
Mon:beef and broccoli
Tuesday: chicken curry
Wednesday:family dinner (on my turn I’ll usually roast/ grill a couple chickens and veggies, quick and easy. Aside from cook time it takes all of 10 minutes to prep, cooking is basically hanging with family and waiting for temp alarm)
Thursday: meat loaf with green beans
Friday: date night
Saturday: leftovers

Also I have a quick and easy bulgolgi approximation sauce that goes well with ground beef. 1T minced garlic, 1T sesame oil, 1t siracha, 1/2T ginger paste, and 1/3c soy sauce/coconut aminos.
 
I watch a lot of those street food channels on Youtube and Korean is one country I want to visit, just for the food! In fact I managed to replicate the egg bread recipe and I've done egg toast as well.
 
I was never able to get into meal prep for the week. With 4 young kids and a fridge that is overflowing with produce just to get through the week, we prep meals everyday. Besides prepping veggies/greens in advance to always have some handy.

I might eat leftovers, if there are any, for lunch or sometimes even breakfast but that's about it.
 
I work in the food industry on the distribution level and that tends to offer me some pretty good hook-ups. We've been blessed with plenty of fresh produce... if we can't get a case of bananas as a discount grocer, I fill a fabric grocery bag at the local Giant Foods with about 15#. That may last two, maybe three days at our house. We are able to get eggs cheap, so we hard-boil two dozen about every other day. We also get cut up fruit like pineapple, mango and the like and my wife freezes it. Perfect for smoothies!

I'd rather come home to egg shells and banana peels all over the table then have the children snackin' on junk food all day.
 
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