Isn't meal prep planning very time-consuming and involves a lot of extra work?
When you think about all the planning involved in Meal Prep, it often seems like a big undertaking that is not easy to manage, especially for families or in stressful everyday life.
In fact, there are different types of meal prep that are easy to manage even in the sometimes confusing everyday family life. So there is no right or wrong way to meal prep - the planning and approach is entirely up to you.
We present some variations of weekly meal prep planning and our tips in this article on meal prep with children and family.
These types of meal prep are available
Since every day is different and some people have to cook for a whole family, while others only cook for themselves, there are very different types of meal prep.
There is no right or wrong way of meal prepping, a plan simply gives you some pointers on how to proceed with your planning.
In the following, we introduce you to some of the meal prep types.
Pre-cooking double quantities
Our first type of meal prep is probably the easiest for beginners to implement. It doesn't require as much planning and is particularly practical for everyday life with children who need lunch boxes for school or nursery.
When pre-cooking, you can cook twice the amount and simply freeze the rest or put it in the fridge. This way, the meal can be enjoyed on one day and quickly reheated at the end of the week for lunch on the go.
This method may not necessarily be suitable for all dishes, but for most meals that are perhaps a little more elaborate, it is quite practical and you don't have to keep coming up with new recipes.
Cooking and freezing
If you don't have much time during the week and would prefer to cook all the dishes for the whole week in advance without eating the same thing all the time, this meal prep method is very useful for you.
Choose a few simple meal prep recipes that have similar ingredients and are easy to combine and create a weekly meal prep plan. Once you have planned all the steps and haven't forgotten anything from your shopping list, you can prepare all the meals in one cooking session.
It is important to consider in advance which steps of the individual dishes can be combined and what large quantities need to be chopped or cooked in order to save time. This also saves you time at the stove and means you don't use any more energy than absolutely necessary.
Note that this option requires a lot of planning and can quickly become complicated if there are many steps involved. So you may need to practise preparing the meals in parallel first.
Pre-cooking individual ingredients
Many weekly meal prep plans are not so easy to implement in a family, as there is simply not enough time for a longer, undisturbed cooking session.
If flexibility in your everyday life is very important to you, this type of meal prep makes perfect sense for you.
Instead of pre-cooking entire dishes, you only plan the basics of your meals. For example, on the first day you might think about preparing a potato casserole, followed by a pasta dish, etc. You prepare and cook this basic ingredient in a few minutes and keep it in the fridge or freezer for the next few days.
The next day, you have already saved yourself a few work steps, as individual ingredients are already prepared and all you have to do is finish cooking the meal or heat it up in the microwave.
This not only gives you some advantages in everyday life with children, but also gives you the freedom to change the recipes spontaneously and adapt them to your wishes.
Preparation of individual ingredients
This meal prep variant is similar to pre-cooking individual ingredients.
Instead of only pre-cooking the base ingredient, the majority of the ingredients required, such as fruit and vegetables, are prepared and chopped and stored in the fridge. Only one preparation session on a day off is used for this and only the final steps such as cooking, baking or preparing a sauce are left out.
In any case, the purpose of this variant is the flexible preparation of food, which makes preparation on the day in question much easier and quicker. These foods can also usually be prepared and frozen in larger quantities so that you can still use them for cooking weeks later.
As you can see, meal prep is basically very simple and can be perfectly adapted to your everyday life. You can think about what's best for you each week and adapt the different types of meal prep to suit your week.
So there is no set plan that works best for you, meal planning depends much more on your needs and plans for the week.
Which type is best suited to your everyday life depends entirely on how much flexibility you want and how much time you have available on individual days.
