Meal Prep Your Way Through 2023!
After five weeks, I can certainly say that meal prepping has super charged my productivity (and health). Here's how:
Meal prepping is one of those “productivity hacks” that you can find in various points around the internet.
We tend to adopt these based on interest and personal recommendation. The barriers tend to be time and energy to undertake something new.
That all said, meal prep seems to be one to me that doesn’t actually require much time or energy and indeed actually saves a good chunk of time.
Here’s a sampling of one week’s meal options:
And here it is all packed up:
My approach, as I’ve documented before is to try to run at least one week-long experiment each month. My record in actually doing this is pretty poor, but January and February tend to be ripe for experimentation. Here’s a bit more about that:
I first gave meal prepping a try back on January 23rd of this year. And to get you right to the conclusion: it was a great improvement on the quality-to-time ratio of our meals. We’ve now done it for four straight weeks, and while I can’t say that it’ll be an every week thing, it’s definitely a part of a normal weekly plan.
I’ll cover two things here: first, a sales pitch of sorts for why meal prepping may be worth trying, and second, notes about the process we’ve worked out (leveraging Notion of course) that makes things a heck of a lot easier!
Why Meal Prep?
My initial drive to meal prep came largely from finding our normal cooking experience to be a bit lacking. It tended to go like this: neither of us really want to cook, nothing is planned, and I had just gotten back from my run. The end result? A quick protein on the stove, rice, and a sautéed veggie of some kind. Not bad, but not exactly inspiring. And it still, between prep and dishes and such, would take 30-45 minutes each night. Alternatively, if neither of us wanted to cook, we’d order takeout which gets expensive and is generally less healthy than cooking at home.
If that sounds like you, then meal prepping may be right for you. Instead of trying to find the inspiration and focus to cook a nice meal every night of the week, all of that can be condensed into a single day, often about three hours.
With one big batch of shopping and cooking, you can have meals ready for the entire week! Doing this turns a nightly ordeal into an easy five to ten minute reheat of one of the meals you prepped.
Because of the focus on a few meals at a dedicated time, you also have the chance to cook “properly” and spend a bit more time making each recipe and making it well. We’ve found our meals end up being higher quality and much more varied than our previous routines. To give you a sense, here’s what we’ve produced through the first four weeks:
Not all of those pictures are mine, obviously, but you get the idea in terms of the variety we’ve been able to throw together. So despite only having three to four meals during a given week, we’ve ended up with a much better variety of food over the course of the month.
So long story short: if you don’t have a chef in the family who is happy to plan each night’s meal, cook it all, and wash the dishes, meal prepping may be a great way to dedicate a chunk of time once a week that’ll give you more varied and higher quality food overall.
Building a Process
As with anything, having a good process built around whatever you are doing can make all the difference. That’s absolutely true with meal prep. I’ll likely go into more detail with this Notion setup at a later date, but the gist is this:
We have a family recipe board where anyone can add recipes and then we can flag any that we want to keep in our personal view.
These recipes are simply clipped from the website using the Notion clipper browser plugin.
Then, I can go through and add a few recipes to each week by just scrolling through my recipes and tagging a few of them.
Increasingly, we have each ingredient in the recipe as a related field to each recipe. TLDR: once we have a set of say 3-4 recipes picked out for a week, our shopping list for that week is automatically created and we can check it off at the store as we shop!
Then, I have this page up on my laptop while I cook, so that I can scan through all of the instructions as I cook.
Last but not least: after making the meals, we leave some comments on each recipe to note what went well, what didn’t, what else we might no next time, et cetera.
Eventually, I’ll make this as a template that you could copy into your own Notion and use. Honestly, it’s super handy and makes the process of meal prepping a hell of a lot easier. Tag a few recipes for the week, and boom, you have your shopping list. Check things off as you buy them. Come home, follow each meal’s instructions which are all in one place. And you are done!
But honestly I’m most excited about having all the comments we leave after each meal. It’s easy to repeat errors in cooking if you cook something once every few months and always go back to the same recipe. But making each recipe a living document with records of what we liked and didn’t like should lead to much better meals a year from now.