Meal prep planning for beginners - how you can do it too

You're under a lot of stress in your everyday life, there are countless things to think about and you don't know how you're going to get everything done.

If you have a lot of responsibility, this will certainly sound familiar. Preparing everything in good time and planning everything for the next week can be a challenge. Especially if you have to plan food for the whole family.

Meal prepping has been a big food trend for some time now and makes meal planning for several days easier.

Find out the best way to go about meal prepping and create stress-free weekly plans for everyday life in our tips here.

Your weekly meal prep plan - this is the best way to proceed

In principle, you don't have to plan your meals for an entire week; it's enough to plan your meals for the next day or a few days in advance. The approach to meal preparation remains the same in and of itself.

Consider a weekly meal prep plan

Before you start meal prepping, you should first think about which meal prep recipes are best suited for the next few days.
Look in your fridge and pantry and think about how you can make good use of the food you already have.

When planning, you can look for suitable meal prep recipes and plan the dishes that will cost you the most effort during the week.

If you run out of creative meal prep ideas, you can find lots of recipes and tips online.

Prepare your dishes

You can then buy all the food you need from the supermarket and start pre-cooking. It is advisable to think about the steps in advance so that you don't have to do certain steps twice.

For example, if you plan to cook a rice dish on two days, you can cook it in larger quantities. If you need vegetables such as tomatoes or peppers for several dishes, you can also chop them all at once.

This allows you to combine your meals differently each time, but avoids a huge amount of effort during preparation.

When meal prepping, some dishes such as stews or soups are easy to cook in larger quantities and then freeze. This allows you to cook a meal for the whole week in advance and store it separately so that you can always defrost the amount you need.

Find out the best way to preserve prepared meals without plastic and what you should bear in mind when freezing here. (Link to article Preserving food without plastic)

Meal prep - what you need for this

If you are preparing different portions at the same time, you need somewhere to store them. Lunch boxes or food storage containers are particularly practical so that you can take your meal straight from the fridge with you.

These are available in all kinds of varieties and are usually perfect for taking and storing both dry and liquid dishes.

So if you're thinking about starting meal prepping, it's a good idea to have cans in which you can store your meals and take them with you.

You can find out more about choosing the right storage containers and lunch boxes here. (Link to article on what to consider when buying storage containers)