Top 4 Back-to-School Meal Prep Ideas

Despite how you may feel, it is already back-to-school season. There was no summer this year. No traveling, no eating out, no partying. Summer was a blur with endless time spent inside with the A/C blasting non-stop. Whether you are going to online/hybrid classes or taking a year off to study for standardized exams, here are my top 4 back-to-school meal prep ideas to get pumped for the hard studying ahead.

The most complained reason of why people cannot cook at home is due to the lack of time. Indeed, it is hard to put 1 or even 2 hours of EVERYDAY cooking. There are other ways to make life easier. The theme of my ideas focuses on saving and using time smartly.

Planning ahead

Regardless of which cuisine you cook, you still need to go shop for the ingredients at the grocery stores. What about spices? Do you want to ruin a whole dish just because you run out of cumin? That would be super frustrating, right? Plan ahead, make a menu of what you will be eating in the upcoming week. There are 2 ways I recommend planning:

• Plan by meals: think about what you want to eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and any other snacks in a day. Write down a couple of dishes and their ingredients.
• Plan by days: if eating in the same routine might be too dull for you, try having 1 new dish every day. For the whole day, you will be consuming that 1 dish, but there will be something new tomorrow.

Big shopping in 1 day

Once you know what food you want to eat, let us go shopping. Remember, the only grocery once a week. Not only will it save you time, but it will also minimize the amount of potential coronavirus disease exposure.

Based on the dishes plan, make a huge checklist to go shopping. You do not necessarily have to shop in only one place or one grocery store. For some of us, diversity in our food is essential. Therefore, it necessitates the need to buy any multiple stores, including small ethnic shops that have specific ingredients. Of course, we will always price-check our checklist to get the most bang for our bucks.

Big prepping on 1 day

After getting all the supplies, you still need to turn the raw ingredients into tasty food. We cannot just eat whole broccoli flowers and drink water as our soup. Prepping the ingredients is going to be the most time-consuming step. From the packages at the grocery stores, your food must be chopped, diced, cleaned, seasoned, and gone through thousands of other steps before actually being heated up on the stove. In restaurants, the chefs call it “mise en place,” French for “putting in place.” For us at home, we should save time in the week by prepping all of our dish components in 1 day. Here are the two ways you can go around this:

• Cook all meals – for this method, you will cook all the meals you plan on this day. The process can be lengthy, up to 6 hours or more. All the meals will then be cooled, sorted into serving size, put in the freezer. The plates you make must be freezer friendly. On the other hand, it will take no time at all when you need to eat.
• Prep ingredients and put in containers – you essentially are completing the “mise en place” step, which all restaurants use. Instead of cooking up the full meal, you will only be preparing the ingredients to be ready for the heat. You will avoid a massive cooking day, but it will take a little longer to eat during the week. The prepped ingredients require appropriate containers, and they might go bad quicker.

Mixing it up on the weekends

If you managed to execute all the above steps, congratulations! If not, there are spaces you can improve in your eating strategy. Repeat after me, the right mindset is critical.

On the other hand, doing the same thing is annoying. Let us have some fun on the weekends! While you are out shopping for the new week, treat yourself at a restaurant (with take-outs, of course.) It serves as an excellent reward for yourself for completing another weak of meal prepping ahead of this back-to-school season.

We will continue to endure the craziness of the last few months of 2020. Make it at least what you are going to eat the least of your problem. I hope these tips helped to prepare for the hardship ahead.