Meal Prep Strategy

I enjoy cooking. Rather, I appreciate all the work that I put into a meal when I’m chowing down and getting the payoff for the hard work.

But, I’m divorced, my oldest kids have grown up and moved out, and my youngest that still lives at home rarely wants to eat anything I cook. I’ll be damned if I’m going through the effort of cooking a good dinner every night. I had tried the meal prep services like Hello Fresh, but even with getting two meals out of each kit, the energy spent into making each dish felt hardly worth the reward.

Back when I was cooking for the fam, I would do theme weeks, where leftovers were re-worked into the next meal and then the next. So, there would be two days of heavy lifting in the kitchen, each followed by one or two days of light cooking with the leftovers. For example, Sunday night might be a homestyle chicken night—chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy and corn. Day 2 might be a fake out of the KFC bowls—all the leftovers dumped into a bowl and covered with cheese. Day 3 might be chicken quesadillas.

But doing even that for just myself felt like too much. I was really missing my eldest, a foodie who would eat just about anything I would conjure up in the kitchen. Cooking for one sucks.

I decided to try a meal prep strategy where I make 8 – 12 servings of a meal, and eat that for lunch and dinner all week. And, as you can imagine, by Wednesday, I’d be craving something new…no matter how good the dish was!

That gave me an idea. I only need 8 meals each week. Lunch and dinner, Monday through Thursday. Fridays and Saturdays are date nights where I eat out. Sunday is my day of leftovers from Friday and Saturday.

So, on Sunday afternoon, I make 10 – 12 servings of the same dish that can be frozen: Kung Pao Chicken, Mongolian Beef, Shrimp Tacos, Shepherd’s Pie, etc. For the first two weeks on this strategy, I’d eat 8 servings of the same dish and then freeze the rest. The payoff started to come in week 3.

On week 3 I made 8 servings of Shepherd’s Pie and froze half. I then pulled out 2 servings of Kung Pao Chicken and 2 servings of Mongolian Beef.  Now I have a rotating variety in my meal prep so I never get bored. Every Sunday, I bank half of what I make in the freezer and withdraw 4 meals.

I’ve been doing this strategy for a few months now and haven’t got bored yet.