If you’ve been a follower for a while, you know that I love a good meal plan. I’ve written posts on how it can change your life, and provided various meal plans, including a popular freezer meal plan,  that showed you how to eat real food on a budget. It’s something I feel passionate about.  Feeding our family, including billets, international students, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc….has shifted over the last year or two. My oldest kids are moved out…at least during the school year…and we are mostly now a family of three. There hasn’t been as much organized meal planning, but I still want to make sure we are eating real food.

Enter meal prep…which gives us lots of healthy meal options for the week.

Meal prep has a lot of the same beginnings of meal planning. I start by checking out the sales and seeing what is the best buy for vegetables and protein, then planning on what meals or lunches we could make from the list of ingredients. The difference is spending a block of time preparing the ingredients…that’s the meal prep…which then will leave you with a fridge full of produce, grains, protein, etc, to transform into quick meal options at the end of a busy day.

This was my first time doing an actual meal prep and if I’m being honest, it really started with prepping for a winter storm, but my teenage daughter has been requesting this for a while. She has told me that if there was a container of chicken, some wraps, salad fixings etc, she could make her own meals or lunches more easily. I actually loved this idea too.

Making lunches in the morning felt much quicker, with containers of real food already prepped. Supper also had some quick and simple options, with us making quesadillas, fried rice, salads and more.

Here’s what I did for my first meal prep:

1. Made hard-boiled eggs
2. Made Peanut Butter Muffins
3. Made Cheese Chili Soup
4. Made Chicken Salsa in my Slow Cooker
5. Made a pot of rice
6. Cut up peppers, carrots and celery

Meal Prep- Healthy Meal Options

• The eggs and muffins became breakfast options and easy after school snacks.
• The cut up veggies were quick to pack lunch or snack choices
• The soup was a supper and a couple of lunches.
• The salsa chicken and peppers were put into wraps and quesadillas.
• The rice and chicken made a quick supper plate that just needed to be reheated with a veggie added.
• Fried Rice with leftover veggies became another supper

It actually felt so satisfying to look in the fridge and see all these ingredients prepped and ready. Knowing there was food ready, and a quick meal only minutes away, made my week feel so much lighter. I already have some meal prep ideas and lists written down for the next time. It’s so simple, but feels like a bit of a game changer.

I got a set of glass containers from Costco for Christmas and I have to say they are perfect for meal prepping, mostly because you can see what is in them, at a glance.

You can pick up similar ones at Gow’s Home Hardware.

I don’t know if I would do this every week, but I definitely think meal prepping is what summer needs. This will make life so much easier with kids with different work schedules and eating at all times of the day and night.

Have you ever meal prepped? Any tips or tricks? Leave a comment and let us know if this has worked for you or if you ever see yourself trying it in the future?