Day 9 – Meal Prep Monday Makes for an Easy Dinner Tuesday (and Wednesday and hopefully Thursday too!)

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Welcome to Day 9! This week is starting out with what I would describe as my ideal state. That means that after we had dinner last night I spent the next hour making and prepping foods for us for the upcoming days.

If I can find some time (typically on a Sunday – though in this case since Monday thanks for Victoria day). I will try to get some dinners prepped for the work week. This doesn’t necessarily mean I cook everything but I will come up with a plan. And if I play my cards right, it hopefully means that we can coast through Thursday and Friday on dressed up leftovers.

I should add that I don’t write anything down or plan it out much before I get started. I look for my inspiration ingredient (typically the food I most worried about spoiling in my fridge) and get going!

So last night here is what I prepared:

• Made a pot of quinoa to be used in the following two recipes
  • Quinoa Salad >> fully made, just needed to be put on the table
  • Stuffed Peppers >> fully made these too, will just need to heat and serve
• Made a Greek marinade (recipe from my Skinny Taste cookbook) and started marinating some frozen chicken thighs
• Marinated some tofu (As I mentioned last week on my blog, we tried this recipe last week and my little said he loved it!)

Tonight’s Menu

With all this prep work done, tonight’s menu was:

1. Quinoa Salad – served with a side of feta in case anyone wanted to try the feta without the salad
2. Grilled, marinated chicken
3. Grilled, marinated tofu
4. Bananas and pears (they are getting ripe and need to get eaten)
5. Some leftover pieces of toast from breakfast
6. Whatever was left in from my kids and husband’s lunches from today

So what did they eat?

My little one (before and after – the top 2 plates) dove right in and started eating the half piece of toast and initially declined everything else. However, by the end of the meal he had also eaten a banana, a pear, a little bit of chicken and another piece of leftover toast. He declined the quinoa salad and the tofu (despite him telling me he liked it last week!)

My older one (before and after – the bottom 2 plates) immediately grabbed the tofu and started eating. He also wanted a slice of toast. Afterwards, he had some chicken, 2 scoops of quinoa salad and 3 pears.

So what?

For our family, if I can do some meal prep one day on the weekend it makes the rest of the week so much easier. I can get a variety of healthy foods to the table for all of us to eat with much less stress than on weeks when I can’t find the time. That being said (take my first week of photo journaling as an example, because I had been away on the weekend) we can make it through without meal prep – but it’s much harder. So I know it won’t come together every week – but I sure love it when it does!

When I do meal prep my goals are to look for recipes that:

1. Use up the stuff in my fridge – for example I had 3 cucumbers and 10 peppers in my fridge so I wanted a recipe that used lots of those ingredients
2. Have recipes with ingredients overlap
   • In this case – I used quinoa in the peppers and in the salad
   • My Greek marinade and the quinoa salad both needed juiced lemons – so I juiced several at once
   • All the recipes needed garlic so I minced 13 in one go and then divided it up as needed for each recipe
3. I try to choose one thing on the menu for each night that I know my kids tend to eat
   • For example the tofu – though joke was on my since my little guy opted not to eat it!
   • The stuffed peppers will be new for us – so I will ensure that there are some fruits or other side dishes that the kids like in case this new recipe isn’t a hit

Do you do meal prep for your family? What tips and tricks do you have about meal prep that work for you? If you have a comment leave one below or send me an email. Thanks for reading!