The SINGLE most impactful action you can take to increase your health is to cook your own food. Must of us know that, but still we increasingly pick ’convenience solutions’ to fit food into our busy lives. This article is about a powerful concept called, ’Meal Prepping’, which is taking the world by storm by making home cooking easier and faster than take-away.
Definition of Meal prepping:
Preparing the bulk of your week’s dinner ingredients in one go, often on Sundays.
Meal prepping is powerful, because it saves time: Why boil rice 3 times, if you can do it once? Why make 5 individual sauces when you can make one large delicious batch on Sunday?
Even more importantly, meal prepping reduces mental stress: No-one enjoys to decide what to eat on an empty stomache on a Wednesday evening after a tough work day. On the contrary, meal prepping allows you to narrow down your options in a more relaxed and playful state on the Sunday prior.
Convinced? Want to start? Here are the 3 meal prepping tricks you can start with THIS Sunday:
1) Cook a large batch of grains and beans
Buy 2-3 grains or beans, soak and boil them, and leave them in the fridge this Sunday.
How much do you need? About 100 grams per person per day (50 grams in dry form)
How to store? Put your boiled grains and beans in closed containers in the fridge – they will last for 3-7 days, depending on the particular grain.
2) Buy seasonal fruit and veggies, store them well, and pickle ONE of them
Buy 4-6 local seasonal vegetables. These will provide freshness, flavor, health, and personality to your dishes.
How much do you need? About 300 grams per person per day. Sounds like a lot? Remember that veggies are 80% water, so much will evaporate during heating.
How to store? Most veggies should be stored in the fridge and can last there for 4-7 days. However, remember to leave the veggies easily visible so you don’t forget them!
Pro-tip: Pick one of the veggies and pickle 1/3 of it. The pickled vegetable will last longer and add crunch, acidity, and freshness to WHATEVER you’re eating throughout the week. It’s surprisingly simple to pickle: Just cover the veggies with vinegar in a jar… and add some salt.
3) Make a ’flavor of the week’ sauce to shine it’s light on everything you cook
Pick spices and umami ingredients that go well with your vegetables and grains, and cook a simple ’flavor or the week’ sauce. It’s simple to make a sauce, just mix the ingredients and bring to a boil in a pan.
How much do you need? About 80 gram of sauce per person per day. In cooked form, sauce will constitute about 1/5 of your meal.
How to store? Once the sauce is cooked, let it cool and store in the fridge for up to 5 days.
Pro-tip: Feeling brave? Add something really zingy to the meal prepping –create your own spicy salsa, a fermented vegetable, or even bake some flatbread. You can create all these in the Plant Jammer app.
Does all this seem a bit hard? All you need to know..
- Cook 2-3 grains and beans
- Buy 4-6 Seasonal local veggies
- Make a sauce
Still have these hard questions:
- What volumes to choose, based on your number of people and number of dinner next week?
- How to remember storage lifetimes?
- Which veggies need to be stored inside and outside fridge?
- Which veggies are in season locally?
- Which veggies can I pickle, and how to pickle them?
- Decide on a flavor of the week to go with the seasonal veggies?
- Know where to buy the ingredients?
- Know how to make the prepped ingredients into actual dinners during the week ?
No worries – Plant Jammer to the rescue 😉 Starting to day, Plant Jammer will launch a ’Meal prep of the week’ theme every week. It is free and will empower anyone to answer all the questions above. Go to the app and find it in its front-page under ’featured dishes’.
Bon appetit!
Michael, CEO of Plant Jammer