How to start weekly meal prepping for stress free mealtimes

If the thought of mealtimes is overwhelming, and you’re looking for a simple way to take the stress out of feeding your family, weekly meal prepping could be the simple solution you’ve been looking for.

Weekly meal prepping isn’t about spending entire weekends cooking, it’s about doing small tasks that make meals quicker and easier to prepare.

Whether it’s chopping fruit or vegetables, getting snacks ready, or pre-making pasta sauces, small meal prep tasks save time, reduce decision fatigue, and help you feel more in control of mealtimes.

This post is the ultimate meal prepping for beginner’s guide. It covers everything you need to know about prepping meals for your family from what meal prepping is, its benefits, simple steps to get started with family meal prepping, and it will even cover some easy meal prep ideas.

Let’s get started!

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What is meal prepping?

Meal prepping means planning and preparing food for the upcoming week, so you can reduce the amount of cooking you need to do during busy weekdays.

Meal prepping doesn’t mean cooking all of your week’s meals ahead of time, it’s about doing whatever you can to make the week’s meals more manageable.

Benefits of meal prepping

Here are just some of the benefits of meal prepping:

• It saves time cooking meals because parts of meals are pre prepared
• Encourages healthier eating
• Reduces food waste by using ingredients you already have
• It saves money on groceries because you can buy ingredients in bulk
• You can prep anything you need for upcoming dinner theme nights

Meal prepping for beginners

Here are some simple steps to get you started on your meal prepping journey.

Plan your meals

The first step in weekly meal prepping is to plan meals for the week ahead, which is where creating a meal plan comes in.

A meal plan simply means having a plan of the meals you’ll make over a dedicated amount of time, for example one week.

Your meal plan will list the days of the week, and the meals you want to cook each day.

Once you know what meals you’ll be having, you’ll know what parts of them you can prep in advance.

It’s important to note that you don’t have to prep meals for every single meal in your meal plan. Starting by prepping 1-2 days’ worth of meals is a great way to ease into meal prepping, and once you feel more confident you can start prepping for more meals.

READ MORE: Family meal planning tips to make meal times easier

Write a grocery list

Once you’ve written your meal plan, the next step is to write a grocery list for the ingredients you need.

Writing a grocery list ensures you buy the ingredients you need for each meal in your meal plan, and can help you stick to a budget when meal planning if you only buy the ingredients you need.

Schedule a meal prepping day

The best way to make time to meal prep is to schedule time each week to do it, and then treat the time you’ve scheduled like an appointment you can’t cancel.

Some examples of times that meal prepping may work for you include:

• Saturday morning
• Sunday afternoon
• Quiet weekday evenings

Meal prep in bulk

This is the meal prep part of meal prepping.

Once you’ve written your meal plan, it’s time to do any food preparation tasks that you can, to reduce the amount of cooking you’ll need to do during the week.

Meal prepping tasks can include:

• Washing, chopping, and portioning fruit and vegetables
• Cooking rice, quinoa, or pasta
• Preparing meat, tofu, or beans
• Making sauces, dressings, or marinades
• Assembling kids school snacks
• Making kids school lunches

RELATED POST: Family batch cooking: How to make mealtimes easier

Use the right storage

Storing prepped ingredients properly means using airtight containers, jars, or reusable bags, and labelling them with the date the contents were prepared, so the contents don’t spoil before they’re used.

Here are some of my favourite meal prep storage solutions, that are perfect for family meal prepping:

• Food storage containers – perfect for pre-cut fruit and vegetables
• Glass food storage containers – great for casseroles, stews, bolognese, and curries
• Reusable freezer bags – perfect for sauces, vegetables, and fruit
• Salad jars – perfect for premade salads
• Labels for food containers

RELATED POST: Simple freezer organisation tips to make meals easier

Meal prep ideas

Here are some meal ideas that you can add to your meal plan, that have components that can be prepped in advance:

Breakfast

• Overnight oats
• Smoothies
• Savoury muffins

Lunch

• Salads
• Wraps
• Soup

Dinner

• Stir-fry
• Pasta
• Curries

Snacks

• Chopped fruit
• Nuts
• Granola bars

RELATED POST: Easy tips for a DIY kids’ snack station

How to start weekly meal prepping – a recap

Meal prepping is one of the simplest ways to make mealtimes less stressful.

By taking time to plan and prepare ahead, you’re setting yourself up for easier, less stressful mealtimes, without the need to cook from scratch every day.

The key to making family meal prepping work is to keep it simple and realistic. You don’t need to prep every single meal to see a difference.

Even preparing a few ingredients, snacks, or one or two meals in advance can save you valuable time during the week.

In case you missed it, here’s your free weekly meal planner and grocery list to help make family meal planning super simple.

What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to preparing family meals?

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