We want to break out of this cycle of ordering delivery but at the same time, cooking everyday has been a challenge. We also have been trying to develop some sort of routine where we meal prep on the weekends but we live in an apartment with a really small kitchen so cooking and storing food for 5 days doesn’t seem doable. Maybe cook for 3 days and then prepare the ingredients to cook again on Wednesday?
I’d appreciate if you could share your strategies and experience. The goal here is to eat healthy and good food.
Edit: Thank you everyone for all your contributions! I am a little overwhelmed by the number of replies so I if I do not reply to you please do now feel bad!!
I just buy premade meals from Trader Joe’s. Not necessarily their frozen foods, but their salads, wraps, and burritos.
We usually cook a large meal or two during the weekend. And will generally get two to three meals out of the dish.
When my wife and I were both working we faced this challenge. We meal prepped on the weekends, portioning the meals out and storing them in our freezer. You could, also, just cook 3 days worth of meals to be frozen and have grab and go type stuff in the fridge (like salads, sandwiches, etc.). We, also, would choose Saturday to have our main meal out and Sunday we would make a pizza (My wife made a crust from scratch or sometimes we would use a pre-made store bought crust) with fresh ingredients.
I loved the pizza day idea! Last week we made japanese curry and ate it at least 3 more times.
Using some prepared ingredients like already marinated chicken or precut veggies can help if you have a small kitchen. Also things like frozen pizza and bag salad is great when you don’t feel like cooking and much cheaper than takeout. As far as meal planning I decide what I want to cook for the week and write it on a whiteboard on my fridge.
I am not great at this, but I find these things helpful:
Cook before you’re hungry. That’s kind of a Captain Obvious line, but sometimes a meal can take more than 1/2 hour to cook and that’s a long time when you’re starving.
Have a limited menu. Find a few things you can stand eating on the regular. Example, I could probably eat meatloaf once every couple of weeks till I die. I keep a list of things like this so if I’m drawing a blank, I can look at it. It’s funny how you forget.
Figure out how to make leftovers not be awful. Example, make meatloaf on a day you don’t work so there’s no time crunch to get dinner on the table. The next day a slice of meatloaf (microwaved or not) with toasted bread and mayo or whatever sauce you like makes a good sandwich with a salad. The salad doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be lettuce and dressing. No time crunch if you rinse the lettuce while the bread is toasting. The next day you could make spaghetti. It’s easy and cheap and you can throw cubed meatloaf into the sauce to be “meatballs”. If you have two days off in a row, make two different meals those nights and rotate the leftovers to last a week without getting bored.
Make a Taco Bell system. By this I mean think about the Taco Bell menu. Most of their menu items are made from the same ingredients, but are prepared differently.
I make something called burrito soup which is browned ground beef, undrained canned green chilis, taco bell sauce (you can buy it bottled at the store), undrained ranch style beans, undrained black beans, undrained canned corn, and whatever else is in the fridge that would work. Seems like it’s all cans, bottles, and beef, but it’s really good. Sometimes I’ll throw in fresh bell peppers or other veg. Anyway, a batch of this is great for burrito filling, served in a bowl with tortilla chips for scooping, in a bowl with extra milk to make a soup, on top of rice, on top of a salad to make a “bowl”. All of these are heated up, btw. One thing is used in a bunch of different ways. Sour cream and guac make this extra special.
Find a “burrito soup” that fits your tastebuds and run with it.
Keep “fast food” in your freezer. It’s no big deal to keep a pizza in the freezer (or something else you know everyone will eat) for when you’re too sick to cook or just aren’t feeling it. It beats eating just chips for dinner or calling for food. I also try to keep the fruit bowl full for snacking. Being hungry will make you quit before you start. Go ahead and eat an orange while you’re making dinner.
Bonus tip If you’re cooking something that can be frozen, double it and stash some for another meal when you aren’t in the mood to cook.
I doubt most people are good at this. Anyway, good luck.
What does “working full-time” mean for you?
How many hours are you away from home each day? I suspect everyone is answering with their view of what working full-time is, but it can be different depending on where you live, how long your commute is, if you work shifts, overtime, etc.
Just for reference, between last Monday and Tuesday I spent 90 hours at the office. Luckily exceptional, but no, I didn’t cook.
Also, leftovers can be great.
Frozen Costco foods heated up and put together. Put some (heated) frozen broccoli in a box of mac and cheese. Eat fish sticks with a bagged salad. How about a pre-prepared frozen Asian noodle dish with veggies? If you’re careful about the nutrition stuff, it’s a real step up from takeout in terms of health and saving money. I know because I only stepped up and started doing it a few months ago. Good luck.
I think prior posts cover things pretty well, but I wanted to add a couple of ideas/thoughts:
- Single pot meals can be very convenient and save prep and cleaning space. The instant pot is great because it can sauté, steam, slow cook, pressure cook.
- Sheet pan meals. Foil over the pan, maybe a bowl for mixing - easy, single pan, space efficient, minimal clean up.
Have really appreciated this thread and reading everyone’s different ideas 😊
My schedule is basically a 60 hour week most of the time, so there are days when cooking a big dinner is just not in the cards. I am single so it is a lot easier to prep and make food for one vs a family so there is that at least.
My routine for many years now has been evolving around a commitment to organic produce and better nutrition. I don’t have anything boxed, canned, or frozen in the house; I guess that sounds weird but where I live it’s easy to get fresh produce so I usually stop by the store every few days on my way home from work and get whatever looks the most yummy and plan from there. Menu during the week (especially in summer) tends to revolve around lot of salads and veggies and adding a chicken breast or fish to go with it, since it takes very little time to cook those additions. I save part for lunch at work the next day.
Weekends are when I have more time to get more creative, so I prepare a couple dishes I may fancy and make sure I cook enough to have leftovers so that I can add those into my week along with the above. In winter, I occasionally use a slow cooker for beans and soups, which makes it nice to come home to ready warm food.
That was the idea of the post. I wanted to create a post that would have different perspectives and that could help other people having the same issues, being for lack of time, ADHD, etc. Thank you for your contribution!
I’m terrible. If I’m cooking for myself? I won’t make anything that takes longer to prepare or clean up than it takes to eat. LOL.
Breakfast, generally, is a small can of whole kernel corn mixed in with a can of chowder.
Lunch is a couple of sandwiches.
Dinner maybe a couple of burgers. Sometimes a big salad.
Now, cooking for OTHER people… that’s a different deal. :) But, yeah, it takes planning, sometimes a week in advance.
As someone else mentioned, decision fatigue is so real for me. Millions of recipes out there, everyone recommends cooking a given meal a bit differently, and then reviews online have further suggestions. I cook enough to follow a recipe well but not enough to know how to cut through the noise.
I started out bouncing around to all the meal delivery services when they’d offer discounts. Try it for a bit, swap to another when the discount ended, swap back when they gave me a “come back” discount. All those services come with recipe cards so I’ve kept those and curated a little recipe book with our favorites. All the info for shopping and prep is right there for me. I guess it’s like a regular recipe book with extra steps, but it sure beats what I used to do with scouring the internet for too long and trying to read my phone while cooking.
You can also create something similar with index cards and an index card holder. Whenever you find a recipe you like, write it down and put it in the card holder, preferably with some dividers for alphabetizing them. I take cards out of my recipe box and arrange them into a meal plan that I just stick to my fridge with magnets. It serves as a meal plan and grocery list all in one, since you can easily see what you will be making for the next 5-7 days or so.
It would not work for grocery shopping or sticking to the fridge like your idea, but I bought a blank recipe book and I’ve been writing in recipes I like with whatever modifications I make so it’s the version of the recipe I like and it’s great. I don’t need to do a meal plan though because I just meal prep one thing for the whole week.
I feel that. I occasionally get myself to try something new. I’ll just keep cooking the same few things I know over and over lol. I definitely need to branch out more, and my food can get really boring to my taste buds, but I’ve survived this far! I do still tend to eat out more then I should though.
Meal prep! I cook once a week, enough to last me most of the week.
I meal prep on Sunday but I’m also ok with eating the same thing 4 or 5 days in a row. If you aren’t ok with that then meal prepping is going to be a lot more work. I also strongly suggest making extra and freezing some in individual portions so if you do run out of food, or just really aren’t digging what you made, you can grab something out of elthe freezer.
And let’s not underestimate the power of making your own frozen junk food. Like frozen burritos? Make a pile of burritos (which is great because you can put exactly what you like and make them healthier) then wrap them individually in tin foil and freeze. Make a frozen pizza in a square casserole dish and freeze pieces. Lasagna also freezes really well. It’s a lot of work up front but it will keep for months so you have something easy to grab when you want it.
You can also precut things like vegetables if you will want to eat veggies later in the week, or if you’ll want to cook something fresh later but know you won’t do it if you have to spend a lot of time on it.
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If I actually wanted to make an event out of it and didn’t have plans for Sunday, then the classic Sunday meal prep strategy applies.
But many times, I also feel lazy or have stuff going on so I try to find one day in the week where I can cook some type of larger effort item that takes more than a couple hours and do the rest on other days. Mind you, I live alone so YMMV. But for example, I could spend one day with the high effort portion of a main dish. This would classically be some type of protein but I don’t always want to limit myself to that mentality. Just anything that I’d be most excited to eat.
If I don’t have the time to make any other sides, I won’t. I’ll have a partial meal that day and do other stuff while I put the rest in the fridge. Then the next day I’ll cook a different side or two. If I do it right, I’ll have a rotating menu of options in the fridge where I cook new dishes to replenish ones that are about to be gone.
This way, I don’t need to dedicate a whole day to cooking, and I can still have fun with cooking in smaller portions and still have the evening to do other things. My meals can also be a mix of various sides which can stagger. This is not always the case as I do find myself just clearing things out frequently to start from a fresh palette of foods. But just a different take on the meal prep that I personally find is manageable.
