Meal Prep Cheatsheet: Making it Easy

Ingredients and hacks to eat healthy without the effort

Even though I’m one of the biggest fans of and users of meal delivery - I still cook at home. Sometimes to save money, other times because I need a change, and often because I forgot to place my order. Here’s what I consider my breakdown of classic meal prep.

Choose your ingredients

To simplify meal choices for classic meal prep, you pick a protein, a veggie, and a grain or bean. Taking the list below, you can mix and match to create endless variety with simple and healthy ingredients. Add your own options to this list. I use minimal seasoning - usually olive oil, salt, and pepper, but using more herbs, seasoning mixes, or sauces like soy sauce can also add some pep.

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Simple meal prep cooking tips

There are two key things I do to minimize meal prep cooking and using lots of pots and pans: sheet pan baking and a rice cooker. You can see my equipment and accessory recommendations here.

Sheet pan baking means you can put all your ingredients on one pan, stick it in the oven and let it go. Use aluminum foil, parchment paper, or a silicone sheet on your sheet pan for easy cleaning. Chop everything up, season it with salt, pepper, and olive oil - or by all means more seasonings if you want - throw it on the pan, in the oven, and bake.

I recently learned the magic of rice cookers. In a pot I need a timer and to be ready to get the rice when it’s done cooking and it often came out too wet or too dry. With the rice cooker you press one button and your done, it switches to warm mode when it’s done cooking so you don’t need to “catch it” at just the right moment. But that’s not the magic.

Rice cookers are magic because you can cook almost any grain in them. Pasta and rice are my weaknesses, but I can now cook “healthier” grains just as easily. Faro is delicious if you haven’t tried it. Quinoa works and I often mix it in with faro or rice. Lentils can be cooked in the rice cooker as well as beans if they’re soaked first. You’ve got any grain or bean cooked unmonitored in your rice cooker so you can go back to whatever else you were doing.

A few recipes

This webpage has a nice collection of relatively simple recipes including sheet pan recipes and one pan bakes such as:

• Sheet pan sausage and veggies

• Ranch chicken meal prep

• Curried cauliflower bake

• Sheet pan honey lemon salmon and broccolini

🥦 Types of DIY Meal Prep

There are two ways to “do” meal prep at home, and two camps of people that staunchly support one or other method.

Meal Prep: The first method is classic meal prep, where you cook all the ingredients and assemble it into individual portion meal containers that often have compartments to keep ingredients separate. Often people make many portions of the exact same meal, like in the left picture above.

Ingredient Prep: The second method is ingredient prep. Here, you cook all the ingredients to the meal and store each ingredient separately. Many people love this approach because they can mix and match ingredients more easily. They can assemble a meal from the fridge easily whenever needed with whatever they’re in the mood for. It also prevents ingredients from blending that you don’t want mixed - for example if they’d get soggy.

Both are great methods, so pick what works for you!

I have some meal prep container recommendations here.

🛠️ NoStove Resources

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