Food prep — I’ve learned to love it and I think you should, too. It’s become almost a necessity for me to prep lunches and dinners in some form or fashion in order for us to be out the door on time in the morning and eating dinner before 9:00pm (added bonus if I have a breakfasty item made for the week before Monday comes).
Our weekly meals vary, but one thing is for certain: we are down with leftovers. That really makes this whole meal planning thing work. Some weeks it’s all I can do to come up with for or five meals to split however many ways in order to have lunch and dinner covered and would find it dang near impossible to figure out more. Though, on the flip-side, you’ll have to see how many times you can take eating the same thing without cringing. I could happily eat a sweet potato most days for lunch, but Pal, not so much. It takes trial and error, but now I feel like I almost have meal planning down to a science.
Knowing just what we’ll be eating throughout the week makes food prep way easier and I know all the foods I prep won’t go to waste. Also, I only prep what will save me time in the evenings. If I can cut up an onion in a few minutes while the pan it’ll go in heats up, I’d rather not cut it up in advance so that I can keep it fresh.
Muffin ingredients: I doubled the amount of almond milk needed to keep them sugar-free.
Millet + Blueberry Muffins: Gluten-free and Vegan
This week I made:
- brown rice for stir-fry
- millet for falafel
- baked potatoes
- pao de queijo pizza dough (dough recipe here; pizza crust directions here)
- caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms (pizza toppings)
- Millet + Blueberry Muffins (a variation of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Millet-Fig Muffins from It’s All Good)
Start to finish, I was in the kitchen about two hours, give or take (including unloading and reloading the dishwasher).
I try to carve out part of an afternoon to make this happen, but know it won’t always be possible. For weekends when I can’t make the prep happen all at once, I spread it out during the week, like making rice or potatoes the night before I need them.
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