It’s Sunday afternoon. Your kitchen counter is covered with containers and baking dishes and you’re loading each of them up with full meals, and there are many duplicates of the same meal prepared.
This activity is known as “Meal Prep Sunday” in some circles. It simply involves preparing a bunch of meals at once on a single day, then freezing the extra meals for easy retrieval later, heating and eating at your leisure. For example, you might make four pans of lasagna at once, eat one for dinner, and freeze the other three. While you’re at it, you might also make four pans of enchiladas and freeze all of those pans, and also prepare 10 bowls of rice and beans as well as 10 bowls of stew for future lunches and then pop all of those in the freezer.
This strategy is both a great time and money saver.
First of all, having a meal-prep day allows you to buy many ingredients in bulk. If you’re preparing four lasagnas at once, for example, and there happens to be a sale on, say, lasagna noodles or pasta sauce, you can choose to buy those ingredients in the largest bulk packages you can find. This strategy works for almost every major ingredient in make-ahead meals you plan to store in the freezer.
In fact, heading to a warehouse club can be a really good idea if you’re gearing up for a meal-prep day, since you can take advantage of the great prices on huge quantities of a single ingredient. Stores like Costco, BJ’s and Sam’s Club offer great prices on items you might not buy regularly because of the volume, but because you’re actually making several full meals at once using that ingredient, you’ll use up that large quantity of, say, pasta sauce before it goes bad, justifying your choice to buy bulk.
Second, you can take enormous advantage of ordinary grocery sales when planning for a meal-prep day. I’ll give you a specific example. Let’s say my family was planning on making several pans of our much-loved spinach and mushroom lasagna. When I look at the grocery store flyer, I happen to notice fresh mushrooms and fresh spinach are on sale. Maybe I should make six pans of it so that I can score all of those cheap ingredients.
The reverse can also be true. Often, I’ll plan out recipes for meal-prep day by looking at the grocery store flyer first. I’ll use the ingredients that happen to be on sale as the backbone of the recipes I choose to make and freeze in bulk.
Third, having heat-and-eat meals on hand in the freezer can cut your alternative meal costs later on. If you have a fully prepared meal in the freezer, you can simply take it out the day before and put it in the refrigerator. Then, that evening, you can just pop it in the oven quickly. That means you don’t have to devote much time on a busy evening to meal-prep. Or, instead of planning on eating out for lunch during the workweek, you can just grab a frozen meal from the fridge, take it to the office, let it thaw a bit in the refrigerator and then microwave it.
What this means is that you’re able to substitute a far less expensive homemade meal for a much more expensive meal from a restaurant or even for a prepackaged meal you bought at the store. For example, I can whip up an amazing bowl of rice and beans that makes for a very filling lunch for about $0.40, but I can’t find anything close to that quality for that price in the store and definitely not in a restaurant.
When you add these factors together, Meal Prep Sunday can be a huge money saver and a pretty nice time saver as well. Want to get started? Shop around for some inexpensive containers and start prepping some of your favorite meals in batches! Good luck!
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How ‘Meal Prep Sunday’ Can Drastically Reduce Your Food Costs originally appeared on usnews.com
